Join the essential international conference of practitioners using an ethnographic lens for sensemaking and transformation.

Hear from EPIC2025 Conference Chairs Anni Ojajärvi and Heli Rantavuo.

Peter Sarlin is Co-founder and CEO of Silo AI, AMD’s world-leading AI lab, shaping the future of AI computing. He is also Professor of Practice at Aalto University an co-leads Europe’s largest open-source AI initiative OpenEuroLLM, bringing together 20 leading institutions to build open AI infrastructure. He will discuss what it really means, in practice, to “put humans at the center” when building or integrating AI solutions.

Intelligence lives in our bodies, movements, and material encounters with the world, including digital ones. This session shares methods for capturing embodied insights in your research and design practice, helping you recognize and incorporate more multidimensional intelligences in product, service, and research experiences.

Frameworks for informed decision making about adopting AI tools in qualitative research, collaboration, and innovation. Presenters evaluate the capabilities and utility of the technologies and illuminate how AI integration could transform our work, our organizations, and ourselves.

Cultivating intelligence to navigate uncertain futures requires framing strategic questions and decisions in new ways. This session uses strategic foresight, speculative, and ethnographic techniques to strengthen the capacity of stakeholders and organizations to innovate for tomorrow.

AI systems are proliferating under paradigms of efficiency, scale, and control. This session uses local knowledge, strategic ambiguity, and ethnographic refusal to re-shape AI and create intelligences that are more responsive to local contexts.

What happens when we recognize the sophisticated capabilities of ecosystems and multispecies assemblages? This session examines intelligence across boundaries and systems, showing how understanding these relationships leads to improved outcomes.

Hear updates from the EPIC board and executive team.

Pauliina Rautio is Professor of Biodiversity Education at the University of Oulu. She leads large-scale research projects on multispecies lives in the framework of environmental social sciences. Her work spans educators, sociologists, anthropologists, biologists, and artists. Pauliina will discuss how multispecies knowledge and storytelling helps us engage intersecting intelligences and define our work and lives beyond species boundaries.

Intelligence emerges through connection, communities, and collaborative processes. This session demonstrates why and how to leverage collective intelligence to design responsive systems and AI solutions that amplify rather than fragment collaboration.

This session offers concrete frameworks and methodologies for AI development that is grounded in human values, ethical collaboration, and deep sociotechnical understandings of non-deterministic interactions.

Ethnographers can help organizations navigate social, regulatory, and technological change. Combining social, organizational, and strategic insight, presenters offer evidence and techniques applicable to work across industries.

The most innovative solutions often emerge from frontline workers adapting systems to meet real needs. This session examines how organizations can recognize and systematize intelligence from the ground up.

In an era where data permeates everything, the boundaries between the biological, material, and digital are increasingly fluid. This panel explores and debates how datafication is fundamentally reshaping the ways humans think, learn, heal, and adapt within their material worlds.

Sarah Pink is an award-winning futures anthropologist and documentary filmmaker and Australian Research Council Laureate Fellowship recipient. She is also a Professor and Director of the Emerging Technologies Research Lab and FUTURES Hub at Monash University. Sarah will explore the evolution of futures ethnography and how we can frame our work amid radical technological, environmental, and economic uncertainties.

EPIC2025 Conference Chairs Anni Ojajärvi and Heli Rantavuo will bring it all together and hand over the baton. Then you’ll meet our EPIC2026 Chairs, who will reveal the location and theme for EPIC2026.

Join us for a casual hangout and meet some excellent folks! Board and staff members will brief you on the latest EPIC news, then we’ll connect around common interests.