Jarno Koponen

File:Jarno-Koponen.jpeg

Summary

Jarno M. Koponen, MA (Media Lab), MA (Humanities), is a Finnish designer, researcher and product leader working on personalisation, artificial intelligence and the design of algorithmic discovery.

Education

In 2004 Koponen graduated with honours as a Master of Arts (Humanities) from the University of Helsinki, with a focus on intellectual history, literature, philosophy and digital communication. In 2009 he received a second Master of Arts (New Media) with honours from the University of Art and Design Helsinki, where at Media Lab Helsinki he extended his work into interactive design, media and design research, game and concept design, project management and future studies.

Working Life

Koponen has worked in digital media as a designer and researcher for two decades, focusing on the design, research and branding of interactive digital artifacts and networked environments. His research work concerns emerging forms of digital communication and interactive social realities, and their effect on personal and collective futures, alongside explorative design, game concepts and artistic projects. His research interests have included future-oriented game-like environments and social media, pursued at Media Lab Helsinki and the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology (HIIT).

He co-founded Futureful, a Finnish startup building predictive discovery interfaces, whose consumer product Random was an app designed to surface content a user would not have thought to look for — an explicit attempt to design against the filter bubble rather than to optimise relevance. He subsequently served as Head of AI and Personalisation at Yle News and Current Affairs, the Finnish public broadcaster, working on the editorial and ethical questions raised by algorithmic curation in public media, and now leads product design for generative AI, agentic AI and personalisation at Zalando. He holds patents on personalisation and discovery methods, and has written on AI and design for TechCrunch.

Key Ideas

• Predictive discovery. Koponen's design problem throughout has been the same one: recommendation systems optimise for what a user is likely to engage with, which reliably narrows what they encounter. His work asks how an interface can introduce genuine novelty without becoming random, and treats serendipity as something to be designed rather than hoped for.
• Koponen's law of personalisation. His formulation that "every digital experience that can be personalised algorithmically, will be personalised algorithmically" — offered less as a prediction than as a reason to decide deliberately what personalisation is for.
• The future self. His earlier research concerns how digital systems model a person over time, and the difference between a profile built from what someone has already done and one that allows for who they are becoming.

Related Work

• Future Self

Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology

Koponen works at the point where an algorithm decides what a person will see, which is one of the more consequential technosocial sites currently in operation. His concern with designing for the person someone might become, rather than for the record of what they have already clicked, is an argument about what a self is — and a rare case of that argument being made inside a product rather than about one.

Website

• http://www.jarnokoponen.net/profile/
• https://jarnokoponen.com/

Contact

• http://twitter.com/ilparone