The Art of Inquiry

Sara Hendren didn't start out in engineering. She started as a visual artist, then moved into cultural history, studying objects, artifacts, and what they say about the world that made them. Then life brought her into pediatric spaces filled with a new kind of object: gadgets and tools designed for a child's body, yes, but also doing quiet therapeutic work, covered in butterflies and bugs,...

Philosopher Don Fallis didn't start out studying lies. He started trying to understand how we find the truth. From library science and disinformation research, Don found himself at the edge of a deeper question: what happens to knowledge when the world is designed to stop you from getting it? In this free-flowing conversation, Don walks us through what it really means to lie and why defining i...

Speech scientist Rupal Patel creates personalized synthetic voices for people who cannot speak, restoring something technology had long ignored: identity. In this free-flowing conversation, Rupal walks us through the signal processing behind blending two voices together, taking the clarity from one and the soul from another. Like mixing an egg's yolk with another's white, or mixing colors...

Oceanographer Hanumant Singh builds robots that venture where humans cannot: beneath Antarctic glaciers, down to the Titanic, and across ancient Phoenician shipwrecks. In this free-flowing conversation, Hanu moves seamlessly from engineering challenges in autonomous underwater vehicles to the surprising art of counting penguins, weaving together technological precision and historical discovery. Ha...

In this episode, we sit down with Paolo Ciuccarelli, a designer and researcher at the forefront of data design. Together, we explore what it means to collaborate across disciplines in this growing field, and how to approach the responsibility of storytelling in shaping public memory. Join us as we reflect on the dual roles of researchers as both scientists and artists, and the creative possibiliti...

Tune in for an introduction to the Art of Inquiry, get to know your hosts, and explore the roles of art and science in your everyday life!