Brown Bag seminar: When technology meets creativity

Join us at the Pakkala Hall in the Saari Central Library on Tuesday, November 17, at 6:00 PM to hear about and discuss the opportunities that technology offers for creativity and how creativity can, in turn, be used to develop and explore technology. In this seminar, we will examine what happens at the intersection of technology and creativity. This Brown Bag seminar is Finnish-speaking and open to everyone, and it is part of the Lumo Art & Tech Festival and the University of Oulu’s programme for the European Capital of Culture year 2026. The speakers are Assistant Professor Ella Peltonen from the Software Engineering Research Unit, Jani Ylioja, Director of the Fab Lab, and Professor Marianne Kinnula from the Information Systems and Human-Computer Interaction Research Unit.

In her presentation, Assistant Professor Ella Peltonen will discuss how technology can enable immersive experiences of unique places. Together with her research group, she has developed virtual environments that allow users to become immersed in meaningful, lifelike settings, creating the sensation of truly being there. In Peltonen’s work, art and technology are interwoven in creative and innovative ways.

Fab Lab is a digital design and fabrication environment, and its Director Jani Ylioja will explain how Fab Lab enables new forms of creative activity. It provides anyone with the opportunity to design and create their own products and devices, taking ideas from initial design through prototyping and development to final production. In Fab Lab, the digital and the physical are inseparably connected, opening up exciting possibilities for creativity.

In her talk, Professor in Human-centred design and digitalisation Marianne Kinnula, will explore how children and young people use technology creatively and how future technologies can be imagined through creative methods. Drawing on examples from her research in kindergartens and schools, she will highlight the importance of ethics, participation, and inclusion in technological development.

The Brown Bag seminar of Lumo Art&Tech festival will take place on Tuesday, November 17 from 6:00 to 7:15 p.m. in Pakkala hall in central library Saari (Kaarlenväylä 3). Register for the seminar here. The event is free of charge and open to everyone. Please note that the seminar presentations will be in Finnish!

The aim of the Brown Bag Seminars is to showcase University of Oulu’s research and to encourage knowledge-sharing and networking amongst our researchers. Once a month, we invite our researchers from different fields to talk about their research related to the same topic and to celebrate Oulu2026 Culture Capital Year we invite also all citizens. Brown Bag Seminars are open to everyone – come learn something new and join in the conversation!

Note UniOGS Doctoral Researchers: You can add Brown Bag Seminars in your personal learning plan and once you have attended 10 Brown Bag Seminars, you can get 0,5 credits of doctoral studies.