Contact Details

Send me an email: kkoulidou[et]gmail.com

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CV

Read my Narrative CV here

I am a mother and a design researcher with background in architecture, jewellery and co-design practices. My academic role is a senior lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University, teaching across jewellery, interior design and architecture.

I have been recently awarded an Early Career Research Innovation Fellowship in 2025-26 to expand my research into Digital Jewellery in the context of loneliness studies. I joined Sheffield Hallam University as a lecturer in BA Jewellery, Materials and Design in April 2020 and I became a member of the Digital Materiality Lab research team in SHU led by Prof. Daniela Petrelli. In September 2021-2026, I was appointed the new Course Leader for the BA Jewellery Materials and Design. In 2025, I have joined the Centre for Loneliness Studies at SHU and became a member of the Campaign to End Loneliness

The last four years I have been developing a Digital Jewellery Starter Kit in collaboration with Luis Carvalho as an innovative way to introduce jewellers to digital jewellery practices. I have submitted an AHRC Curiosity Bid in 2024, even though unsuccessful, it was the instigator in creating a research network of jewellers working in the field of wearable technology, wearable health technology and art digital jewellery. In 2025-26, the Digital Jewellery Collective met in Edinbrugh, Sheffield and Copenhagen.

Previously (2019-2020), I was employed as a Senior Research Associate at Northumbria University on the project Enabling Ongoingness: Content Creation & Consumption in the New Digital Age, a 3 years EPSRC funded project led by Prof. Jayne Wallace. The project aimed to enable people in early stages of dementia, in bereavement, end-of-life to create content that will intersect dynamically with that created by their loved ones in future years when they are unable to tell them how we feel about them ourselves. Find more about the project here.

In 2019, I awarded my PhD for my thesis “A practice-led inquiry into the nature of digital jewellery: Craft explorations and Dialogical Enagegements with people”. My thesis explores how wearable technology and jewellery practices open new ways of connectivity between people in the context of living in-between two places of home. Understanding how people feel and experience a situation is an important part of my design research practice. Find more about my PhD here.

Prior to my doctoral studies (2012-14), I completed a MSc degree in IT Product Design (SDU, Denmark) with design experiments in musical knitting, wearable probes and I have a previous training in architecture (2004-2011, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece) and silversmithing (2011-2012, mokume).

I enjoy travelling, hiking and connecting with people from all over the world.

My research

Over the last 10 years, I have developed a growing interest in exploring the intersection of jewellery practices and digital technology. My design research practice explores and reconsiders digital jewellery as objects that bring together art jewellery practices and advances in digital technology to sense our bodies and connect us with others and with places across distance in poetic and emotionally rich ways.

Following a Research through Design approach, I draw on autobiographical experiences and craft methodologies to develop novel jewellery and objects that tell stories of connection, belonging and relationships. My research has previously explored contexts including migration and life transitions such as bereavement and dementia. More recently, I have extended this work into loneliness studies, exploring how jewellery, material practices and digital technologies can support meaningful connections between people and nature.

I also seek to connect my research with practice and impact beyond academia, including through activities and collaborations with the Campaign to End Loneliness.