Dr Tiina Kymäläinen is responsible for the research strategy at the Creative Science Foundation where she is responsible for overseeing the organization’s research and development strategy steering its scientific methods to push the boundaries of human knowledge and technology innovations so as to support its many applications in industry, education, government and society in general.

Dr Kymäläinen works at Technical Research Centre of Finland Ltd as a Senior Scientist. Her research activities relate to social design, human-driven design, ecosystem innovation and emerging technologies, such as digital platforms and intelligent ecosystems. Her research methods include user-centred- and user-experience design, future-oriented design, participatory foresight and, particularly, the use of creative and narrative methods in research.

In 2015 Dr Kymäläinen graduated as Doctor of Arts from Aalto University, School of Art, Design and Architecture, Department of Design. Her doctoral dissertation, entitled “Science Fiction Prototypes as Design Outcome of Research”, studied how creative prototyping, and especially science fiction prototyping (SFP), could be used for illustrating more abstract user-centred research results. In essence, the nominated case studies explored the questions: 1) what aspects in daily life people find important and valuable in the future, 2) what is viable and technically feasible in 5–10-year time-span, and, 3) what is societally important and valuable in future life. After her dissertation, Dr Kymäläinen studied how future-oriented methods may be applied to industrial design and research (more specifically, to intelligent machines, automation and ecosystem research). She has also studied how the creative methods can be adapted to foresight research, with the assumption that any totalising predictions of the future will be flawed, biased and ultimately fix specific aspects of the imagined future, as any revolutionary technology will defy the mainstream predictions. More recently Dr. Kymäläinen has explored how the concept of Holodeck can be seen as a new medium for future enacted, narrative experiences. This work has included a Holonovel-course at Aalto University (Department of Film, Television and Scenography) and two Creative Science workshops.