EPIC2025 Kickoff

A lively event designed to inspire your work through Intelligences—and entice you to submit a proposal to EPIC2025!

During our January kickoff, we convened for expert talks about our theme Intelligences and learned how to submit a proposal to present your work at EPIC2025. Kickoff videos will be available shortly!

EPIC2025 explores Intelligences – the multiple, collective, and distributed capabilities of social, technical, business, and environmental systems (read the theme). We invite you to join us to engage new kinds of intelligences and their application to advance the goals and wellbeing of diverse people and environments.

Program

Introduction to Intelligences

Welcome!

Kickoff Chairs and emcees Iveta Hajdakova and Louise Vang Jensen launch our program with a warm welcome to EPIC.

Intelligences (and Saunas)

How are models of intelligence driving, but also constraining, our capacities for innovation and wellbeing? EPIC2025 Chairs Anni Ojajärvi and Heli Rantavuo explain the theme Intelligences and preview our annual conference in Helsinki – a global design mecca, thriving innovation ecosystem, and walkable city with renowned architecture, beautiful fall color, and more saunas than cars.

Thematic Talks

Intelligences and Creativity in Innovation

Pilar Opazo, Carroll School of Management, Boston College

How do we account for intelligence? Pilar Opazo’s ethnographic and business case study of a world-famous restaurant in Spain holds important lessons about the power of distributing and organizing intelligence to drive innovation. She reveals how the restaurant codified a systematic approach to taste, fostering creativity and collaboration among its team and establishing a knowledge framework that made the business an exemplar of innovation. But did the systematization of knowledge also drive creativity to its limits?

Pilar Opazo specializes in the interplay between innovation and creativity, organizational behavior, negotiations, and qualitative methods. She examines curiosity as an agentic force that extends beyond individual minds to the entire organization. She is author of the book Appetite for Innovation and co-author of Comunicaciones de la organización (Communications in Organizations) and Negociación: ¿Cooperar o competir? (Negotiation: Competing or Collaborating?).

Intelligences and Ecological Thinking

Attila Márton, Copenhagen Business School

According to ecological thinking, intelligence is not an attribute of a self-contained entity (such as a human being) but an accomplishment of a relationship. What kind of relationships generate the kinds of artificial intelligences (human-made but non-human) that capture the imagination of business and society alike? Or to put it in ecological terms; what kind of ecology needs to be in place so that certain kinds of intelligences are not only acceptable but desirable?

Attila Márton is a digital ecologist focused on the digitalization of core social phenomena. His goal is to propel ecosystemic thinking to make digitalization serve humanity. He currently work explores the co-evolutionary dynamics between platforms and their respective ecosystems, and the political ecology of digital labour and AI.

Intelligences and Communicative AI

Alexandra Zafiroglu, School of Cybernetics, Australia National University

Almost a decade since we first heard of neural networks and a few years into LLMs, communicative AI feels inescapable – it’s everywhere, whether we’ve asked for it or not. This talk considers some framings on the nature of communicative AI that we can use to debate their intelligence, intelligibility, uses, and misuses, including in qualitative research and ethnographic work. Where are our voices and expertise needed? What should we expect and demand of ourselves in this moment?

In the School of Cybernetics at ANY, Alexandra Zafiroglu, trains new practitioners who will guide us towards safe, sustainable and responsible futures with technology. Previously she worked at Intel Corporate as a researcher, UX architect, and principal engineer in the People and Practices, Digital Home, Client Computing, and Internet of Things divisions.

Intelligences in Translation

Lindsey Dewitt Prat, Bold Insight
Ishtiaque Ahmed, Computer Science, University of Toronto

The race is on to create vast and comprehensive datasets, including through synthetic data, for more powerful LLMs and eventually AGI. But these datasets are haunted by what’s missing. This talk explores language datafication as a process of translation in which forms of intelligence are transformed, created, and excluded. The speakers discuss concrete ways ethnography has illuminated these dynamics and guided AI development toward deeper, creative engagements with multiple intelligences.

Lindsey DeWitt Prat is a Director of Research at Bold Insight, where she leads global UX research initiatives to help teams understand how cultural and linguistic dynamics shape technology use. Currently she is focused on strategies to make AI more inclusive and culturally resonant. An ethnographer, author, and translator, she brings cultural insights to projects spanning 25+ countries, with particular expertise in Japan and East Asia. Lindsey is also an AI for Developing Countries Forum (AIFOD) Senior Fellow.

Ishtiaque Ahmed works in the intersection of Human-Computer Interaction and AI. He has developed successful computing technologies with various marginalized communities in Bangladesh, India, Canada, USA, Pakistan, Iraq, Turkey, and Ecuador. Ishtiaque has been awarded multiple honors and fellowships, published over 100 peer-reviewed research articles, and was named “Future Leader” by the Computing Research Association in 2024.

Proposal Format Pitches

Papers, Case Studies, PechaKucha, Arts & Experiences, or Graduate Colloquium?

In this lightning round, Program Committee Chairs had just three minutes each to inspire and entice you to submit a proposal to present in the EPIC2025 Main Program. Which track won you over?

Q&A with EPIC2025 Leadership

Ask Us Anything: Chat in Breakouts

Attendees talked with Program Committee Chairs about proposal ideas and met the Conference Chairs and EPIC leadership.

Meet the Kickoff Chairs

The thematic programming for the EPIC2025 is developed by EPIC Members:

Iveta hajdakova

Associate Director | Stripe Partners

Iveta is a specialist in economic anthropology and the anthropology of experience. She is interested in understanding how value is created through interactions with people, things, spaces, services and technology. Her approach draws inspiration from feminist thought and Science and Technology Studies (STS).

Iveta holds a PhD in Anthropology from Charles University in Prague and was a 2012–13 Fulbright-Masaryk Visiting Scholar at Columbia University in New York. Since leaving academia, she has worked with a range of global technology, retail and hospitality companies, helping them drive strategy, innovation and design.

Louise Vang Jensen

Partner & Co-CEO | IS IT A BIRD

Louise is the anthropological lighthouse and co-CEO of IS IT A BIRD. Alongside Sune Holm Thøgersen, she heads a creative, multidisciplinary team that applies diverse skills in research, design and strategy to a shared urge to place human needs and aspirations at the very core of the strategic development of organizations.

Louise is a trusted advisor to industry leading companies with a track record of collaboration at organizations including VELUX, Novo Nordisk and Nike.