I am a researcher, artist and curator working with knowledge and learning designs across Learning Sciences, Design and Science and Technology Studies (STS).
For more than twenty years, I have worked with museums, universities and cultural institutions to develop exhibitions, learning environments and other epistemic arrangements for experience, learning and knowing.
My work investigates how knowing emerges through material-semiotic arrangements – through design understood as practices, media, environments and other configurations that shape how we learn, know and experience the world.
I create and study environments, media, and practices through which learning, knowing and experience take shape.
Across research-creation, artistic and curatorial practice, leadership and education, I design and study epistemic environments and epistemic media for learning, knowing and experience — including exhibitions, learning environments, laboratories, and other experiential formats in which knowledge unfolds as situated, negotiated, and performative.
I understand design as an active participant in epistemic processes. This has led me to develop the concept of Ontoepistemic Design: the study and design of the material-semiotic arrangements, practices, and environments that participate in the enactment and configuration of knowing.
My research program in Ontoepistemic Design investigates how material-semiotic arrangements, practices, environments, and media participate in the enactment and configuration of knowing.
My practice connects artistic inquiry with empirical research, ethnography, design, and pedagogical experimentation. Working transdisciplinarily, I create and curate situations in which scientific, experiential, artistic, and more-than-human forms of knowing can coexist and inform one another.
I also lead long-term collaborations concerned with learning environments, research environments, institutional infrastructures, and knowledge ecologies.
Artistic practice: Intermedia Practice
Research website: https://portal.findresearcher.sdu.dk/da/persons/connie-svabo
Connie Svabo in Anatomy Galaxy Curatorial Studio, University of Southern Denmark, 2026. Photograph: Michael Shanks.