Julia Keyte

Personal statement

Julia Keyte is Course Leader for BA (Hons) Furniture and Product Design. She is a designer, experienced educator and researcher and is passionate about making as a basis for innovation.

Julia’s creative roots are in jewellery design. Her collections exploring precious metals and alternative materials became the basis for a practice that expanded across product design, packaging and textiles. Her work has been exhibited across the UK, Europe and in the US, and represented in international design awards and significant private collections.

Julia also publishes research on the unobserved emotional power of everyday possessions, and is excited about how the critical practice of design can reshape consumption.

She has established original practice-based methods for engaging audiences in active reflection on their practices of keeping possessions, and developed participatory activities and public events that bring together making, design, display, exchange and curation. Her research is published through peer reviewed academic journals such as Studies in Material Thinking and Interiors (Bloomsbury). Through her research Julia’s teaching is informed by cutting edge thinking, leading to new projects such as Thinking Keeping, with product designer Richard Evans and structural packaging designer Peter MacQueen.

Julia has a BA (Hons) from the internationally respected silversmithing and jewellery department at Edinburgh College of Art, and an MFA in product design from the Sandberg Institute, Amsterdam.