Professor Sarah Kettley Inaugural Lecture

Edinburgh College of Art is delighted to announce the inaugural lecture of Professor Sarah Kettley.

It has been said that what we make in turn makes us. If so, does it matter how we go about making? This talk considers calls for the failed meta-narrative of progress to be countered with the carefulness and authenticity of craft and explores how an outdated romantic notion of craft might itself be ‘remade’.

I will propose three lenses for remaking craft - the idea of proximity as a form of relationality, the notion of relational depth in therapeutic practice, and concepts of co-becoming in new materialism.

Through these I hope to illustrate how craft can offer an alternative attitude to design and progress, at a time when we increasingly understand the environment to no longer be apart from us, but to be a very part of our being.

About Professor Sarah Kettley

Professor Sarah Kettley is Chair of Material and Design Innovation at Edinburgh College of Art, The University of Edinburgh.

She currently works with multidisciplinary teams in the social care and health service sectors, leading on participatory and co-design methodologies informed by humanistic approaches in psychology. With a background in contemporary jewellery, she has explored what craft brings to the development of wearable technology and brought these two strands of work together in the project An Internet of Soft Things, which introduced third sector mental health communities to the imaginaries of electronic textiles.

Sarah holds a doctorate in computer science, and publishes across the fields of design, craft and the humanities. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts, a founder member of the international practice-research-friendly Arcintex research network, and co-chairs the RAFT research group at Edinburgh College of Art.

The lecture will be followed by a drinks reception.