Emilia Tikka

Emilia Tikka is a designer and researcher with a focus on critical and speculative design practices, novel biomedical technologies and synthetic biology. Her research interests include genome-editing technology CRISPR, epigenetics, human-nature-technology relations and feminist science and technology studies.

She is a PhD candidate at Aalto University, School of Arts, Design and Architecture in Helsinki. Her practice based research project Mnemonia is situated in the contemporary nomadic reindeer herding cultures in the Finnish Sápmi, where modern technoscience collides with ancestral knowledges and practices. In her research, speculative design is taken as a dialogic approach to explore more-than-modern bioscience futures with local collaborators in the Arctic. She has been granted a research scholarship by Finnish Kone Foundation.

Emilia is currently an advisor for the Cluster project CollActive Materials. She is also a member of research groups Empirica at Aalto University in the department of Design and VALDA at Tampere University in the department of Social Sciences. Her former affiliations include: visiting scholar at Helmholtz Center for Cultural Techniques at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, artist in residence at the genome-engineering laboratories of Max-Delbrück-Centre for Molecular Medicine in Berlin, artist in residence in 2-year EU project Art4med and artist in residence at Tokyo Art and Science, to mention a few. Her artistic works are exhibited internationally.