Satu Miettinen works as a professor at the University of Lapland. For several years she has been working with service design research and authored number of books and research publications in this area. Her research interests are in the areas of service design including the areas of social and public service development, citizen engagement and digital service development. She is running several national and international service design research projects coordinated. Satu Miettinen is a visiting professor at Center for Design Research, Stanford University, USA with Design X research group. She is working in Palo Alto from the 1^st of August, 2015 until the 31^st of July, 2016. She has also been a visiting professor at Tongji University College of Design and Innovation, China and Centre for Aesthetics in Practice at University of Trento, Italy.

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. Textiles, crafts and creative tourism are in her research interests.

In addition to service design she works in the area of arctic design. Arctic Design produces solutions to the needs of extreme and marginal contexts. These solutions are scalable and applicable in other contexts as well. Arctic Design is about producing extreme wellbeing and competitive edge for circumpolar areas. She is co-ordinating DESIS lab for Arctic Design.

Satu Miettinen works actively in the area of social design in Namibia, South Africa and China. She is active artist and designer in the area socially engaged art. She has been involved with My Dream World project that included series of socially engaged art and service design workshops and exhibitions in Namibia, South Africa and Finland.