Emilia Tikka
Doctoral Researcher
Emilia Tikka is a designer/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 currently a PhD candidate at Aalto University in the department of Design. Her practice based project 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 a senior advisor for CollActive Materials a collaborative project of two Berlin Exellence Clusters: Matters of Activity. Image Space Material at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and Science of Intelligence at Technical University Berlin. Next to Empirica, she is also a member of a research group VALDA at Tampere University in the department of Social Sciences. Her former affiliations include: visiting scholar at Helmholtz Center for Cultural Techniques at HU-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.