Arts & Experiences

Nora Morales Zaragoza, Researcher Professor, Autonomous Metropolitan University Cuajimalpa
Blanca Miedes, Research Professor, University of Huelva

This experience offers a unique space to investigate how the body serves not only as a sensor but as a form of intelligence—bridging cognition, perception, and action. Rooted in the methodology of Social Presencing Theatre, it uses body movement, presence, and scribing as tools to surface hidden dynamics in collective behavior – making visible what is often felt but not spoken within social systems. As the session unfolds, participants will collectively navigate a “stuck” social situation and explore transitions toward an “unstuck” state, allowing the body to guide reflection and transformation. They will translate their embodied insights into visual form, co-creating a collective map of organizational dynamics.

Location: Thursday, 1:25-1:55 pm, Palaver

Capacity: 25 participants. Pre-registration is required. Conference attendees will receive a sign-up link in July and articipation is first-come, first-served.

Creators

Nora Morales is an Information Designer and researcher professor at UAM Cuajimalpa in Mexico City. She holds a PhD in Social Sciences and is interested in participatory research and visual practices as a tool to understand complexity and guide transformative change.

Blanca Miedes is an economist and research professor from Huelva University in Spain. She likes to think outside the brain, using the feelings and movements of our bodies in the physical space to comprehend more deeply and imaginatively.

Almina Karya Odabasi, Education and Research Officer, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

This interactive performance explores embodied intelligence and real-time decision-making through improvised movement shaped by audience input. By positioning the body as a site of sensemaking, it challenges our notions of control and highlights how embodied values and decisions exceed what can be captured through quantification. Using a structured prompting method, audience members become co-creators, providing input that influences the dancer’s movement in real time. Attendees will gain insight into how bodily, environmental, and social dynamics inform creative action, offering fresh perspectives on adaptability, agency, and intelligence.

Time & Location: Wednesday, 6:30–7:00 pm, Ravintola Töölö (conference dinner venue).

Capacity: All attendees who have purchased a dinner ticket can participate. Note: this experience does not require pre-registration, but dinner tickets must be purchased in advance.

Creator

Almina Karya Odabasi is an Education and Research Officer at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam’s Organization Sciences Department. She holds dual BScs in International Relations and Business Administration and an MSc in Culture and Management. Her research explores embodiment to understand culture as lived and experienced through the body, focusing on how physical being intertwines with norms, power dynamics, and identities. She has a close affinity with performing arts and professional groups with high physical engagement. Karya is also a trained dancer with experience across several genres, with practice spanning both choreographed and improvisational forms. Through a comprehensive embodied and theoretical lens, she investigates how movement and physical presence shape cultural and organizational life.

Michael Hallam, Consultant, IS IT A BIRD

As social complexity increases, so does the need for creative and collective solutions. This experience invites attendees to attempt to build a collective problem-solving intelligence based on the wisdom of crowds – the idea that a collective of heterogeneous opinions can outperform the reasoning of a single intelligent individual. Attendees will attempt to solve a simple yet elusive puzzle. After each solution attempt, learnings are passed on to the collective, building a common pool of knowledge for future generations of puzzle-solvers to access over the course of the conference. As the collective intelligence grows, attendees will be prompted to reflect upon the relations between individual and collective intelligence and what it means to be a knowledge creator in that setting.

Attendees can participate in this experience throughout the conference.

Creator

Michael Hallam is a researcher driven by excavating the hidden facets of human experience to develop long-lasting and meaningful solutions. With a background in sociology and strategic design, he brings together diverse perspectives in his approach to problem-solving creating social solutions. Michael has a passion for game design and previously developed games and large-scale interactive experiences.

Emiko Stock, Anthropologist At Large, Freelance

This experience offers participants a sensorial shift, engaging with sound as an intelligence embedded in bodies, environments, and histories. Through a Helsinki soundwalk, we’ll foreground reflexivity through attunement to noise, silence, and sonic presence. By engaging with sonic knowledge, participants will develop a heightened awareness of listening as an active act—one essential to how we understand intelligence in research, design, and lived experience.

Time & location: Tuesday, 10:00 am–12:00 pm, meeting point in downtown Helsinki TBA.

Capacity: 20 participants. Pre-registration is required. Conference attendees will receive a sign-up link in July and articipation is first-come, first-served.

Creator

Emiko Stock is an intercultural mediator, educator, and storyteller with a research-based art practice spanning experimental writing, sound, film, photography, and sketchnotes. A multimodal anthropologist and creative ethnographer based between Phnom Penh and Cairo, Emiko is fascinated by everyday improvisations. Her empathetic approach fosters globally informed and culturally relevant understandings that help reshape socially conscious presents and futures.

Meghan McGrath, IBM Future Demands, IBM
Sarah Brooks, Designer, Apple

These cards prompt engagement with non-human beings in EPIC2025 conversations. Bringing in the qualities and capabilities of plants, animals, and ecosystems, they are a mechanism to de-center humans as the sole planetary intelligence. We’ll engage with slime molds, bioluminescent algae, the Mariana Trench, and others to enrich our conversations.

Attendees will receive cards with their conference badge at check-in. An audio version also will be available.

Creators

Meghan McGrath is the Future Demands Lead for IBM Infrastructure. She led the design and ethnography work on IBM Pervasive Encryption, which work has been featured in Fast Company and in a HBS case study. She represented IBM at the 3Ai Institute from 2019-2020.

Sarah Brooks is a designer and inner-world explorer who believes in the power of applied creativity within organizations to bring forth lasting, positive social change. With a cross-disciplinary approach and academic training in film, fine art, fashion design, and social work, her multi-decade career spans both the public and private sectors. A designer at Apple focused on health and home, Sarah is led by her empathetic vision for a more equitable future.

Michael Powell, Partner, Practica Group
Gregory Weinstein, Design Researcher and Inclusive Designer, Independent Consultant

This event includes two intertwined artistic experiences, which are also exploratory ethnographic methods. Soundwalk leads a group through an urban neighborhood in Helsinki, inviting participants to focus on the soundscape. Sound Map is a technology-enabled platform for collecting sound recordings and interpretive notes, inviting online audiences to “read” the urban soundscape in new ways. “What are we listening for?” will invite participants to investigate why and when to employ listening practices in their ethnographic projects.

Time & location: Tuesday, 10:00 am–12:00 pm, meeting point in downtown Helsinki TBA.

Capacity: 20 participants. Pre-registration is required. Conference attendees will receive a sign-up link in July and articipation is first-come, first-served.

Creators

Michael Powell, PhD, is Partner at Practica Group, a strategic insights and ethnographic research consultancy. He has worked with clients and research teams in diverse sectors and industries, from mobility technology, health care, and consumer retail, to architecture, civic participation, and food justice. Michael teaches an EPIC course on ethnographic interviewing and has worked on multiple projects around listening as a research method and as a practice of everyday life.

Greg Weinstein is a design researcher, acoustic anthropologist, and accessibility evangelist. He advocates for making user research inclusive from end to end, so that design can serve and empower people in their limitless diversity. Before working independently, Greg was at CVS Health, leading Inclusive Research for the Design Accessibility team. Outside of work, you’re likely to find Greg watching a ballgame with his cats, reading a good mystery, or supporting the EPIC conference.