Designing Systems That Elevate Technology at the Intersection of Innovation, Consciousness, and Experience

Future of Work Project with Parsons DESIS Lab awarded C77DA 2015 
as a professional category runner up.

Designing for Financial Empowerment Project with Parsons DESIS Lab was honored with notable mention at C77DA 2016 in Service Design category.

Service Design

"We experience services every day — from buying health insurance to filing tax returns. A service is an exchange of goods or value. A complete service includes designed or planned interactions among people, products, and processes in various places and over time. We often encounter a service (like visiting the DMV, renting a car, or using a bike share) where only some parts of its service touchpoints are designed with clear intention and purpose. In fact, most services we have today kind of just "happen” and aren’t consciously designed even though about 80% of our economy is services.

Service design is the process of planning and organizing the people, infrastructure, communication, and physical components involved in a service. It's a collaborative and participatory practice in which citizens, experts, community-based organizations, and governments work together closely to create and deliver better public services. Deliberately designing services in this way, ensures that the experience and value of the service meet the needs of both users' and providers."

User research

what we say | what we do | what we desire

Most of our projects start with a research / discovery phase. The depth and methods of this phase depend on the budget, timing and the client / partners' availability. During this phase we use similar methods to scientists' - such as interviews, observations and literature reviews. But our focus often differs from academic researchers. We focus on specific interactions and experiences to gather insight for a particular service innovation. As most of service design processes are iterative, research continues even after the initial designs created.

Co-design

planning | priming | facilitating

One of the unique tools that service designers and some user experience researchers use is the collaborative design. Most of the time, systems are effected by several decision makers and they effect many different stakeholders. When we dedicate some time and space to co-design; inviting users, service providers and experts - whenever appropriate - allows us to understand multiple perspectives, create holistic solutions to systemic problems and ensure that our proposals are driven by genuine needs rather than our own preferences. 

Prototyping

paper | digital | Physical

The prototyping phase is when we begin to "try out" the ideas generated during a project in order to see how they look, feel, and function outside of our heads and in the real world. This typically involves mocking-up interfaces, role-playing interactions, and engaging with potential users and other stakeholders to understand how they experience the new service(s) we are developing. Until we start to build, enact, or otherwise realize our designs in this way, we can only speculate about how they might actually work -- and how they could work better.

Resources: wikipedia.org
                  dfe.nyc

Visualizations

mapping services | unfolding complex systems 

Services are multi dimensional complex systems. They exist only with people interacting with them. There are actors, locations, timeframes, constantly changing contexts and priorities. In order to make decision and test those decisions in this kind of complex structures, we need to take a slice of the whole and have a look at the 2 dimensional representation of the situation. This way, every stakeholder included in the process can see flows, problems and opportunities more clearly, and join the decision making process with confidence. Each visualization; journey map, storyboard, system map focuses on a limited number of variables and ignores other dimensions to make the complexity clear. So it reflects the perspective of the maker. Just like how surface of the planet is actually stretched by the cartographers while making a world map. 

Designing Products and Experiences for 20 Years

Born and raised in Istanbul, Turkey. Lived and studied in Milan and New York.

Decided to be a designer at age 8.

Graduated the Industrial Design BA with honors.

Holds a Master of Science degree in Product Service System Design from Politecnico di Milano.

Was awarded a scholarship to study in New York at Parsons Transdisciplinary Design Program.

Worked on wide-ranging projects gaining visualization, production, project management and team building skills.

Certified and experienced in mindfulness instruction.

Curious about daily routines of creators and dynamics of successful (and failing) teams and constantly researches and tests new ways for improving creative collaboration.