David Sloan Wilson is one of biology’s most prolific and impactful scientists. He is author of paradigmatic contributions to evolutionary theory and how organisms behave, such as multilevel selection and core design principles for the efficacy of groups. But the reach of his work is far beyond the domains of biology and sociology, in whole a toolkit for improving how we live together and weaving between areas of thought.
Read MoreEd Finn might be best described as an imaginer. The rest of the many things that he is and does kind of fall into place with that foundation. He started and for the past decade has been Director of the unexampled Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University.
Read MoreAlex McDowell is a worldbuilder. He builds future realities to envision worlds that don't yet exist. By working across disciplines to imagine the future, his worlds inform and inspire stories and open eyes to new possibilities.
Read MorePoetry comes up so often in my conversations these days. Our society in crisis seems to be desperate for it, without being able to name that desperation until a poem calls it out of us. For years, award-winning Poet David Hassler has been defining and redefining how poetry enters and moves people and communities.
Read MoreAlicia Juarrero is Professor Emerita of Philosophy at Prince George’s Community College (Maryland) and the author of Dynamics in Action, a text that many consider to have laid the foundation for how we think about complexity in our society. So Alicia is a philosopher for this moment in human history.
Read MoreBrandon Ballengée has a unique quality of attention, one that is not constrained by traditional distinctions between art & science and working & living. He wants to share that capacity to witness to liberate everyone's imagination of what this world can be, a world we are of rather than just in. This ecological consciousness informs his work as a visual artist, biologist and environmental educator.
Read MoreAfter a few month hiatus, we're back with an exhilarating, generative, spacious season of the Origins Podcast! Join us as we explore threshold topics of our days through the lens we’ve always had: explorations of the spaces between art, science, engineering, and design with the people who live in and shape them, drawn out in ways that will be meaningful to you.
Read MoreSara Hendren is a humanist in tech. This may seem like a strange statement, but it may be a perfect place to pick up Sara's trajectory. It both describes her well as someone who makes a life-defying categories and is at the same time too small for her expansive presence in this world. She is a brilliant designer, an affecting educator, and just might be the source of language that will transform the way you witness the world.
Read MoreMichael Hochberg is Distinguished Research Director with the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (the French National Centre for Scientific Research) and based at the University of Montpellier, France. His research has for many years spanned fields from ecology to epidemiology to biodiversity to innovation to the communication of science and touches every scale imaginable, from cells to societies.
Read MoreFor years now I've wanted to speak with Dave Snowden because he has helped me understand complexity and how to navigate a complex world better than perhaps any other thinker. At the same time, it's intimidating to interview someone who draws so widely from all schools of thought and can be so coherent on a topic as immense and complicated as sensemaking.
Dave Snowden is the founder and chief scientific officer of Cognitive Edge, a Singapore-based management-consulting firm specializing in complexity and sensemaking. He's the developer of the Cynefin Framework--a conceptual framework used to aid decision-making across any context.
It is Dave's ability to weave seamlessly across fields of anthropology, ecology, philosophy, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, engineering, and complex adaptive systems theory, pulling together a coherent, inspiring, and actionable fabric of thought that has always drawn me to his work.
Read MoreKaty Börner is one of the great mappers of our age. Her maps tell the history of science, trace how communication has evolved from the stone age to modern day, and reveal the connections across our society. In her work, all of these things become visual and interactive. That is to say she is the perfect person to talk to in this age when complexity lurks behind the most intractable issues facing our society and demands new ways of witnessing them.
Read MoreCecilia Conrad reimagines what it means to ‘empower,’ embracing the idea throughout her life and transcending it to radically change the world as the steward of the MacArthur Foundation Genius Grants and 100&Change Program. She offers guidance about how to think about empowerment to bring change to our own lives and to connect us with change in the world.
Read MoreDr. and professor Jessica Flack has been a dream guest for Origins since the beginning - the kind of generous intellect and polymath whose words and work expand everyone around her. She also might be the person we can place our trust in to help us learn how to make sense of an increasingly complex world.
Read MoreJoAnn Kuchera-Morin is a composer. But the music she writes is more than mere notes. Her 'music' is both song and her research into new modes of immersive, interactive scientific and artistic investigation, finding new frontiers at the intersection of science, engineering, art, and design. Through art as with science, her work seeks to create as she says, "an exponential rise in consciousness."
Read MoreI have trouble wrapping any adequate labels around this episode’s guest, Paco Nathan. Paco is a technologist, data scientist and an evangelist of a brighter data and technology future. He has an uncommon ability to synthesize the gaps and trends in this complex and evolving space, and gives me hope that we can create a more flourishing future within it.
Read MoreCaitlin McShea is that special kind of curious that you cannot help but be inspired by, and she has the intellect to spread that curiosity over any domain. For the past ten years in roles varying from director of art galleries, curator and coordinator of exhibits, and now as a program manager at the Santa Fe Institute, she has been giving language, image, and concreteness to some of the most imaginative and futuristic thoughts of our age.
Read MoreProfessor Anima Anandkumar is a meteor in the field of artificial intelligence or AI. Her rise in the space has been a phenomenon to behold and her voice is a refreshing and inviting one that might just alter the trajectory of AI and society.
Read MoreDan Goods is a leader among the community of creatives at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, so he's an imaginer among imaginers. A creator among creators. He's one of the most innovative minds I've come across, and someone who embodies selflessness and that most wonderful and contagious quality that is an insatiable curiosity.
Read More