Why Do We Do the Things We Do? Podcast Course

This project course brought together MA students from across Aalto’s schools for multidisciplinary collaboration and blended learning through the essentials of podcast production. It was offered as part of the UWAS program. In it, students worked in groups to develop research projects on site, acting as curators, journalists, and producers, investigating stories behind interesting and radical local projects and the people that make them happen. The course supported them to explore ethnographic skills through the topics they wished to investigate in the context of Aalto and its surrounding communities, bring the people involved in those stories to the Conversation Room, facilitate dialogues around them, and produce one episode each.

The episodes were developed around dialogues held in the Conversation Room, a sound sculpture by Ariel Bustamante located in Otaniemi, whose particular quality of encounter shaped the content and atmosphere of each recording. Content and style of the episodes were open-ended, but they all featured in a single series: The Squirrel’s Nest / Oravan Pesä, a podcast created in 2018 around this sculpture and its animating question --- “Why do we do the things we do?” By developing episodes to circulate online, the course extended the reach of those conversations to wider audiences, making visible challenging and unique stories that students deemed worth telling and that might otherwise pass unnoticed even within Aalto itself. All episodes were edited with the support of Camilo Sanchez at Media Lab and Aalto Studios, and launched through Aalto media.