At the moment, Satu Miettinen works as a professor of applied art and design at the University of Lapland. For several years she has been working with service design research and writing. She is actively working with service design research in the area of social and public service development. Her research interest is in developing artistic and drama based methods in the area of service design. She is working in the steering groups of several service design research projects: developing public services for the elderly, developing service prototyping, service design and commercializing sleep. She has been the research lead and director in the service design project called Service design for Elderly funded by the Finnish Funding Agency for Innovation and Technology. She also worked as a principal investigator in the “Experiencing Well-being – Developing New User Interfaces and Service Platforms for Leisure” project, which was funded by the Finnish Funding Agency for Innovation and Technology, TEKES.
Dr. Satu Miettinen has worked as a co-ordinator for the Competence Center of Industrial Design at the Savonia University of Applied Sciences. The Center combines design, business and technology. In past she has worked as a Head of the Product Design Department of the Kuopio Academy of Design, Savonia University of Applied Sciences. In the past she has worked as a project manager and specialist in the areas of crafts development, cultural and creative tourism in several international and European Union-funded projects during the period 1997–2006. Satu Miettinen also workS actively in the area of social design in Namibia and in South Africa.