BrAIn Lab

The ITU BrAIn Lab is a research environment at the IT University of Copenhagen focused on the intersection of artificial intelligence and cognitive science, exploring how people think, interact, and make sense of the systems around them. It is the kind of place where the questions being asked have a way of changing how you think about design.

I work there as Lab Manager alongside my studies, which means keeping the day to day running of the lab on track and supporting the researchers in doing their work. It is a role that has pushed me to think more analytically, not just about organisation and communication, but about how people experience and navigate the things we build for them. That kind of thinking has quietly found its way into everything I design.

But my role does not stop at managing the lab. I also handle the visual communication and promotional graphics for the lab, and I am currently building their website from the ground up, a custom solution designed specifically around the needs of a research environment. It is a project that sits right at the crossroads of design and function, which is exactly where I feel most at home.

Taking on the Lab Manager role was honestly a bigger shift than I expected. Coming from a design background, suddenly finding myself responsible for setting up and operating physiopsychology equipment, EEG amplifiers, ECG sensors, eye-trackers, was a steep learning curve. These are tools that measure how the human body actually responds to what it sees and experiences, and getting comfortable with them took time, patience, and more than a few moments of feeling completely out of my depth.

But that discomfort turned out to be one of the most valuable things I have experienced. Because once it clicked, it changed the way I think about design entirely. Seeing firsthand how a poorly placed button or an overwhelming interface can produce a measurable physical response in someone, a spike in heart rate, a shift in eye movement, a change in brain activity, makes it very hard to be casual about the design decisions you make. It made everything feel more consequential, in the best possible way.

If anything, working in the BrAIn Lab has only deepened my love for UX and the questions it asks. The idea that what we put on a screen has a real, physical impact on the people looking at it is something I find endlessly fascinating, and it is a perspective I do not think I could have found anywhere else. It is the kind of thing that does not just inform your work, it becomes part of how you see the world.