What are the concerns involved and the complex challenges of designing technology for a better, safer life? What is the flip side of the quantified self? How to ensure the agency, autonomy and control users have over their data? How does it support skills like reflection and self-regulation? Two researchers discuss self-monitoring in relation to autonomous learning processes, and the utility of user-centered media design in situations like the process of recovering from the trauma of intimate partner violence. We talk with Laura Uusitalo and Eva Durall about their MA and PhD research projects in the Department of Media, digging into complexities of the participatory design of these tools. We examine the needs of populations in high-risk of abuse, the opportunities and risks that the information technology enables in abusive situations, and cultural implications of the increasing technological mediation of our private lives.

With the occasion of the screening of “The Optics of Space” at Heureka science center, we start off with a conversation on the cross-pollination between art and science. The film projection was developed for a planetarium by curator Aily Nash with works by artists Lucy Raven, and James N. Kienitz Wilkins, and commissioned by the Finnish Cultural Institute in New York’s and PUBLICS, Helsinki. Gathering perspectives from the art field and space science, we to tap into the cinematic experience, the educational and research potential of visual information, and the ways in which art appropriates technological tools to convey different meanings. The invitees are Aalto professor of astronomy Dr. Joni Tammi, director of the Metsähovi Observatory, and curator Marina Valle Noronha, PhD researcher in Aalto School of Arts. Though the two conversations we bring forward the stakes and merits of films, by putting them in direct connection with scientific perspectives on space observation, the dissemination of astronomical knowledge, and the role of art in shaping human vision of the universe.

The launching episode features a conversation of host María Villa with Bassam el Baroni, Assistant Professor of Curating of the ViCCA Masters, and Ksenia Kaverina, the curator in the Aalto Arts & Creative Practices Initiative, that supports this podcast. ​We venture to discuss the original idea of Chilean artist Ariel Bustamante—bringing people inside the Conversation Room​ to have meaningful dialogues— and how it might be shaped ahead by the context. Thinking of the squirrel that built its nest inside the ​Conversation Room​, repurposing it as part of Otaniemi’s natural environment in the winter of 2017, we discuss what this ​Conversation Room​ stands for in the middle of a science/design/business driven environment. What is the potential it creates as a site for public debate, a resonance box, bringing in multi- and cross-disciplinary ideas, and what should be contemporary art’s role in the same context?