Sarah teaches across the School of Design on courses such as Design Identities; Introduction to Body Studies; Body, Identity and Technology; Design for Ageing; Objects of Desire; and Film Medicine. She supports final year UG dissertation and Masters major projects across Design and for the EFI Service Management and Design programme. She has designed, managed and delivered a range of courses and programmes in design education, and specialises in supporting transformative learning for students across disciplinary boundaries and through practice research. She supervises and examines PhD candidates in craft, participatory and service design, design philosophy, smart textiles, design in health and care, and Human-Computer Interaction. She authored the Bloomsbury Required Reading teaching title, Designing with Smart Textiles, and was a sub-editor on the award-winning Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Design. Sarah is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Sarah is no longer able to accept applications from prospective PhD students for the academic year 2026/27.

Professor Kettley’s research is concerned with craft-led and person-centred methodologies for ethical participatory design with near future technologies. Within this, she develops design methodology through making, applies relational approaches to design for care, and facilitates futures thinking workshops for research, industry and public services. Recent funded projects have included CoGIF (Creating the Generative Conditions for Imaginative Research Futures) (Wellcome), EDAC (Eating Disorder and Autism Collaborative) (MRC), and Healthier Working Lives for the Care Workforce (ESRC) and she has authored or co-authored more than 100 research outputs. Current writing projects focus on the paradigms of psychotherapy and their implications for design in healthcare contexts, and on craft as a processual-relational way of knowing and being in the world.

Summaries can be found in these two public talks:

• Craft as Relational Encounter: Proximity, Depth and Co-becoming
  Edinburgh College of Art, April 2025, Inaugural Lecture recording
• 5 Women 5 Questions – University of Edinburgh podcast series, Celebrating Women’s History Month March 2022

Sarah regularly reviews for academic conferences and journals. She is co-editor-in-chief of the MDPI journal Crafts, and co-convenor of the EFI research cluster in Creative Health and Technology with Dr Shama Rahman and Lynne Craig. She is an active member of the ECA RAFT and Film Medicine research groups, a founder member of Arcintex, an international ‘research-through-design friendly network’ led by the University of Boras, and convenes the Design Research Society special interest group on tangible, embedded and networked technologies (tentSIG).

Much of her work is collaborative and cross-disciplinary, and sometimes it generates toolkits, and artefacts that are exhibited. Venues have included: the London Design Festival; the Lakeside Gallery, and Bonington Gallery, Nottingham; the House of Lords, London; the British Council in Milan; MIT Media Lab, Boston USA; Dundee Contemporary Arts; the CCA, Glasgow; InSpace Gallery in Edinburgh; the Bonhoga Gallery, Shetland; NiMK, and de Waag in Amsterdam; Leonardo Education Forum, Dallas; the Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh; the Museum of Culture in Kyoto, Japan; Futuresonic, Manchester; ISEA, Ireland; the Travelling Gallery, Scotland; and ElectroFringe, Australia. In an earlier life she was a practising contemporary jeweller selling through Crafts Council listed galleries in the UK and Harrods, London.