Roope Mokka

Futurist, Demos Helsinki

Mokka is an adviser and practitioner of social transformation, through imagination, and experimentation. Currently, Mokka dedicates most of his time and effort to build the terrestrial alliance for social transformation Untitled, founded together with some forty activist organisations such as Demos Helsinki, Dark Matter Labs, Bethnal Green Ventures, Democratic Society, Y-foundation, The Service Workers Union, Long Now, Mitsubishi UFJ Research and Consulting, STHML Tech Fest, City of Helsinki, VestAndPage, RebootUS, FundingBox, and Life Itself.

He is a futurist, urbanist, and artist helping with cities, corporations, central governments, political parties, civic groups, foundations, news and media, cultural institutions, startups, artists, performers, technologist and events to become socially relevant.

Over three decades in foresight Mokka has led a number of research projects and authored a wide range of studies in the future of democracy, technology, culture, lifestyles and cities. He has written about mobile games, machine-to-machine communication, economic growth, urban competitiveness, platform companies at the urban scale, climate change and consumerism, and digitalisation as well sustainable lifestyles, future of health, politics of happiness, and data driven societies. He has published books in digitalisation and climate change and has been a columnist for several newspapers and magazines and for the national broadcaster in Finland since 2016. Mokka’s work has been published in Finnish, Swedish, Italian, Japanese, and Russian.

Besides research and advisory work, Mokka is a hands-on urbanist and artist. He has experience in leading multidisciplinary teams spanning several organisations to delivered plans for metropolitan, urban, and property development (some of which have even been realised). Mokka’s artistic work is ritualistic, experimental and employs often methods from social sciences, technology, and futures thinking. He is a member of a visual and conceptual art group Unpublished Us (founded together with visual artist Sami Lukkarinen in 2019) and Bodytalk dance group (founded together with dancer Simo Vassinen and choreographer Mari F Scaroni 2020). He was also a member of Länsiväylä the urban performance group from 2007-2010. His art has been presented at leading art institutions and festivals such as Museum of Contemporary Arts Kiasma, Mänttä Art Festival, International Photo Triennale Backlight, Huuto Gallery, and Kunsthalle Turku.