EPIC is an annual conference and year-round community of researchers, designers, creators, and innovators doing ethnography for impact. Our members help organizations make strategic decisions, create value, and navigate uncertainty by understanding people within cultural ecosystems.
2025 Conference Theme
EPIC2025 explores Intelligences – the multiple, collective, and distributed capabilities of social, technical, business, and environmental systems.
The provocation of EPIC2025 is that when we engage and amplify multiple intelligences, we can create greater value for insights, strategy, innovation, communities, and organizational leadership.
Stay tuned for the full conference theme, our call for participation and proposals, and everything you need to know to be part of EPIC2025!
Come to Helsinki!
The EPIC2025 conference venue is Dipoli, the beautiful and iconic heart of Aalto University.
Helsinki is renowned for its stunning arts and architecture spanning centuries.
You won’t need a car in Finland, but you will need a sauna! (There are, in fact, more saunas than cars.)
Meet the Helsinki Team
Anni is an ethnographer with a PhD in sociology and a rich background spanning both academia and business. She seamlessly integrates ethnographic insights with strategic foresight, strategy work, and design to help organizations make better decisions. Anni has held senior leadership roles in business and strategy consultancy, strategic foresight, and applied ethnography. Currently, she works at the Social Insurance Institution of Finland (Kela), where she applies human and cultural perspectives to drive innovation. Her passion about business ethnography and the EPIC community inspired her to found Humans – Human Sciences in Strategy – an association dedicated to advancing the use of human sciences in strategy work and fostering a professional community. Anni has been an active member of the EPIC community since 2018 and has contributed to its conferences as a committee member, curator, and reviewer.
Heli Rantavuo, Doctor of Arts, works as an applied social scientist in industry. She has held senior researcher and research leadership roles at Spotify, eBay, Microsoft and Nokia and currently she is Head of Customer Insight at OP Financial group. Before her industry career, Heli worked as academic researcher at LSE, Waseda University, and Aalto University, from which she graduated as Doctor of Arts in New Media Design. Her passion is to advance the use of ethnography and socio-cultural approaches in business and strategy. Heli has contributed to past EPIC conferences as a speaker, committee member, curator and reviewer. She is a founding member of the Human Sciences in Strategy Finland association.
Antti Rannisto is a sociologist and ethnographer working as the Insight Lead at Solita’s Design & Strategy unit. For the past 15 years he has worked with applied social science in service and product design, organisational change, brands and communications. Much of Antti’s current work revolves around social implications of emerging technologies, helping organisations balance and better position human and non-human agency in sociotechnical systems. He also works part-time at Aalto University’s multidisciplinary research group on Civic Agency in AI.
Liubava is a Research Lead at Gemic. She holds three master’s degrees, in the philosophy of culture, comparative sociology, and cultural anthropology. She has over 15 years of experience in applied social research. Liubava’s current role at Gemic revolves around finding the most elegant ways to frame projects, as well as conduct research and analysis. She finds it exciting to balance best practices of qualitative research with pioneering approaches, mixing established theories with unconventional interventions.