Professor Sarah Kettley
Job title:
Chair of Material and Design Innovation, School of Design
Role:
Director of Research, School of Design
Office:
5.24, Evolution House
Research Output:
Edinburgh Research Explorer linkBiography
BA (Hons), MSc, PhD, FHEA
Sarah is Chair of Material and Design Innovation, working across craft, new technologies, and the humanities. She is currently Director of Research for the School of Design. She has previously served as Design's Postgraduate Research Director, and Head of the School of Design (2017-2020), and between 2019 and 2022 was seconded to the Edinburgh Futures Institute as an Academic Fellow.
She holds an MSc in Interactive Systems, and gained her PhD in Craft as a Methodology for the Design of Wearable Computing in 2007 from Edinburgh Napier University. Her undergraduate degree was in Jewellery and Silversmithing, from Glasgow School of Art, and before joining Edinburgh, she taught in Product Design at Nottingham Trent University.
Sarah teaches across the School of Design on courses such as Design Identities; Introduction to Body Studies; Design for Ageing; Objects of Desire; and Film Medicine. She teaches research in Product Design and supports MA students in Design Informatics as a dissertation tutor. She has designed, managed and delivered a range of courses and programmes in design education, and specialises in curating learning for students across disciplinary boundaries. She supervises and examines PhD candidates in craft, participatory and service design, design philosophy, smart textiles, 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 currently welcoming enquiries from prospective PhD students. She is experienced in supporting practice research.
Research
Research
There are two major strands to Sarah's research: the development of design methodology through making; and the application of relational approaches to designing for care. Occasionally, these strands come together. You can listen to her talk about these in this podcast:
Sarah regularly reviews for academic conferences in HCI and Design research, and:
- co-chairs the ECA RAFT research group with Dr Jessamy Kelly, in which members discuss the development of craft and making
- is a member of the Arcintex steering group, a ‘research-through-design friendly network’ concerned with the commonalities of architecture, interaction design and smart textiles, led by the University of Boras in Sweden
- 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 physical and/or interactive things that can be exhibited. Venues have included: the RCA at 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.
Current PhD students
PhD Supervision Topics
- Craft theory, new materialism and craft as epistemology
- Relational and processual design philosophies
- Craft and design methodologies informed by psychotherapeutic Person-Centred Theory
- Participatory, service and co-design design methodologies in care sectors
- Critical humanities informed wearable technology, smart textiles and soft robotics development
