Hasta La Ideas

Ayse Birsel in her studio. Photo by Hello Design.

This is the third installment of our Core77 Questionnaire. We’ll be posting a new interview every other Tuesday.

Name: Ayse Birsel

Occupation: Chief De:Re Officer at Birsel + Seck. My occupation is product designer, but my design process is deconstruction and reconstruction. So I declared myself Chief De:Re Officer a while back.

Location: New York City, Istanbul and Dakar. Our office is in New York, and the majority of our clients are in the states. But we also have clients in Istanbul, and then Dakar is really my partner, Bibi Seck’s, specialty.

Current projects: At NeoCon, I had a collection with FilzFelt, a company that makes beautiful felt products. Most of their focus is custom felt products, and they asked me to make some ready-mades for them, including screens, rugs and tabletop products.

We have a project for the Herman Miller Collection, but I can’t say more than that. We’ve been working with Toyota, deconstructing and reconstructing driving around some of their current segments. For Bridgestone Turkey, we’re developing an innovation culture for them, from the ground up.

I also teach at the Products of Design program at the School of Visual Arts, and I’ve launched a workshop, Design the Life You Love, which I continue to do. Then we do Design the Work You Love with corporate clients, and I’m also working on the Design the Life You Love book.

Mission: Think differently and design the life you love.

Photo by Hello Design

When did you decide that you wanted to be a designer? I thought that I was going to become an architect, and then a family friend came to tea and told me about product design, using a teacup as an example. It changed my life. I fell in love with the humanness of product design and decided to become a designer.

Education: I studied product design at Middle East Technical University, in Turkey, and then came to Pratt Institute to do my graduate studies, also in product design.

First design job: Bruce Hannah was the chair of the product-design department at Pratt and my thesis advisor. As I was graduating, he offered for me to collaborate with him on this new project that he was working on, which was office accessories for Knoll. And when the product came out as Knoll Orchestra, they gave me credit with him. So that was my first design job.

Who is your design hero? Rowena Reed Kostellow. She was my teacher at Pratt. She was 80-plus years old when I met her, and she became my teacher and then my friend and my hero. She was the co-founder of this methodology of three-dimensional visual thinking—she taught you how to create something beautiful, dynamic, and well balanced in three dimensions, just like you would create a beautiful piece of music. It’s one of the key building blocks of design education at Pratt to this day.

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