News

A Thank You to the EPIC2023 Sponsors & Equity Partners

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EPIC sponsors

SIMON ROBERTS, EPIC Board President As we gear up for EPIC2023, there are many causes for excitement and celebration. It was a record year for submissions that reflected the cutting-edge work our members are doing at the intersection of culture and technology, innovation, generative AI, climate change, social justice and equity, market shifts, and organizational transformation. EPIC2023 presentations address these issues and more, providing an unparalleled opportunity for collective engagement on pressing topics.  And yet, few will be surprised to learn that it’s not been an easy year to secure conference sponsorship. Uncertainty has reigned. In that context, we’re beyond…

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Perspectives

“Every project is an opportunity to advocate for spatial justice and equitable design” – a conversation with Paola Aguirre Serrano

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Paola Aguirre Serrano Q&A graphic
We can't wait to welcome Paola Aguirre Serrano, EPIC2023 keynote speaker, and hear her talk "Designing With: Collaboration Frameworks for Spatial Justice & Equitable Design." To get ready to engage with this crucial topic, we talked with Paola about the challenges and rewards of multidisciplinary work, ethnographic perspectives and practices that have been important to her, how she thinks about friction, and what she's most looking forward to at EPIC2023. You’re the founder of Borderless Studio, an urban design and research studio focused on approaches and collaboration frameworks addressing spatial justice and equitable design while cultivating collaborative design agency. What do borders and the concept of “borderless” mean to you? Borderless for me is a practice of resistance against fragmentation, silos and compartmentalized perspectives. Borderless is an invitation to collaborate, grounded in values of openness, civicness and publicness – and to use design as a tool to practice generosity, empathy and service...

News

EPIC Celebrates Departing Board Members, Welcomes New Members

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Images of incoming and outgoing EPIC Board members in Spring 2023

Please join us in thanking Martha Cotton and Carol Zatorre for their service and welcoming Samantha Gottlieb and Shriram Venkatraman to the EPIC Board of Directors. The EPIC Board exists to define the long-term direction of the organization and its activities. It also provides counsel to the hard-working executive team who deliver the activities and initiatives that make the EPIC community what it is today. The board is more than symbolic. It gets real work done that moves EPIC forward. This is well demonstrated by new initiatives such as the Equity Program. Given the commitment involved, it’s only right that the…

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Introducing the 2023 EPIC Equity Program Chairs

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EPIC Equity Chairs

Meet the leaders working to advance equity and diversity through a new EPIC program! In May 2023 we will welcome the first cohort of participants in our new program, Becoming EPIC: Building Equity. Initiated by the EPIC Equity Council, this program is being developed and chaired in 2023 by four leaders in our community: Eric Atkinson, Etienne Fang, Chelsea Mauldin, and María Vidart-Delgado. They are joined by the talented researcher and strategist ToTran Nguyen, who as Program Manager is central to moving this initiative forward. We’re so grateful for their leadership and expertise. We hope you’ll get to know them,…

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Perspectives

Ethnography, Ethics & Time

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Japanese panel painting
  "Ethnographers flit forwards and backwards all the time as we create research objectives, wonder whether what we learnt yesterday is really the full story, and create and debate theories." Ethnographers are not time travelers, but we may be close. Our frameworks and methodologies develop a nuanced understanding of how relationships, processes, and objects evolve over time. This 'temporal expertise' is key to enacting our ethical responsibility to the past and future, says anthropologist Dr. Oliver Pattenden, who will explore these themes in his upcoming EPIC Talk on April 25, 2023: From Complex Histories to Possible Futures: Ethical Practice Across Time. In this Q&A, he discusses the intersection of ethnography, ethics, and time; how to encourage organizations to focus on ethics as a core component of decision-making, and what he's learned from his three-year-old son lately. We hope you enjoy this rich conversation! When people think about ethics, time probably isn’t the first thing that comes to mind. What inspired...
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