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, useful and expressive all at once. She found herself asking: what is an object broadcasting beyond its user? What does it mean that eyeglasses get sold as fashion while hearing aids are hidden away as clinical? That was the moment everything snapped together, her training in the history of artifacts, the politics of disability, and the material culture of prosthetics all converging at once. In this free-flowing conversation, Sara walks us through the space between mechanical design and design for expression, why the logical and meticulous side of making art and the creative side of meaningful engineering are really the same instinct. As the world asks more and more from its engineers, Sara brings it all back to a question that feels more urgent than ever: can a designed object change not just how we move through the world, but how we see it?

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 it is harder than it sounds. Along the way, Descartes' deceiving demon starts to look a lot like a modern con artist, pop culture becomes an unexpected training ground for spotting deception and Wikipedia, that forbidden source from every syllabus, may have been more trustworthy than our teachers let on. As AI makes it cheaper to fake something than to make the real version, Don brings it all back to a question that feels more urgent than ever: should we accept that all human knowledge is a little bit fallible and what do we do with that?

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 to paint something entirely new. Rupal carries us on this unedited episode from technical precision to the profound act of giving someone back a piece of themselves.

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. Hanu carries us on this unedited episode from technical ingenuity to the profound wonder of ocean exploration.

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 possibilities that emerge when design meets data.

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!