Ep. 116: Human-Centered Designer Ayse Birsel
Industrial designer Ayse Birsel grew up thinking she’d become a lawyer until a revelation with a teacup enlightened her to the principles and practice of design. Always a playful soul, her essence of playfulness is an important part of her creative process - a process she’s used to design award-winning products as well as to help people design a life and work they love. Now, she shows us an optimistic way to lean into the transformative opportunities that are inherent in these challenging times. Listen:
AD: Hello! This episode is brought to you as part of WantedDesign Manhattan Online, a Conversation Series presented with Design Milk and Clever. Each day from May 11-22, 2020, will feature design dialogues including new episodes of Clever, and engaging live conversations with very special guests. To view the schedule and register for events, head to wanteddesignnyc.com/online. That’s wanteddesignnyc.com/online.
Support for Clever comes from the Polish Cultural Institute New York. Eco-Solidarity is a multidisciplinary project that is a result of collaboration with Tomek Rygalik and Studio Rygalik with the help of WantedDesign, that brings together art and design into one platform for sharing ideas in the public space by integrating local communities, as well as international design industries. Please stayed tuned after my talk with Ayse Birsel to hear a special presentation with Tomek Rygalik about this exceptional project called Circula. And visit Circula.org to learn more. That’s c i r c u l a . org
Ayse Birsel: So design is all about how can we solve problems collaboratively and with empathy and optimism and with an open mind so we can better our lives.
AD: Hi everyone, I’m Amy Devers and this is Clever. Today, I’m excited to bring you a conversation with Ayse Birsel. Ayse is an award winning Industrial Designer and co-founder of Birsel + Seck a human centered design and innovation studio she operates with Bibi Seck, her partner in life and design. Renowned for her work with Herman Miller, Toto, Target, Ikea and many others, She is one of Fast Company’s Most Creative People 2017. In addition to product design, she authored the book, Design The Life You Love - based on the idea that life is just like a design problem and anyone can design the life they’ve always wanted using the principles of design and her 4 step creative process. Here’s Ayse.
AB: I’m Ayse Birsel and I live and work in New York, midtown and I am a designer of products, services and experiences. I also teach people how to design the life and work they love, using my design process, Deconstruction and Reconstruction.
AD: I am so excited to learn all about that, but before we get there, I always love to take a tour through your formative years to figure out you know, kind of how you got to be you. Will you take us back to your childhood and tell me what that was like?
AB: I’m so glad you ask about my childhood. These days I actually say hello to my seven year old self every day because I feel like that’s my real person. And so I grew up in Turkey in a family of lawyers and I thought I was going to become a lawyer until I realized I really loved to draw and thought maybe I should become an artist. Then I thought, how about architecture, until I discovered design, industrial design.
AD: So what was your, your hometown like and what was it like living in a family of lawyers? Was everybody litigating and presenting airtight cases or, tell me about your family dynamic?
AB: I grew up in Izmir, which at the time was a small Aegean city and kind of quiet and beautiful and I remember getting really bored on Sundays [laughs]. So my dad and my uncles, my aunts, they all, almost everyone, my great uncle, all of them were lawyers, but they were also very interested in the arts and architecture and history.
So there was this kind of nice balance and growing up in Izmir, Izmir is really close to Ephesus where there are all these beautiful Roman ruins. So my parents would take my brother and I to Ephesus on weekends for like day trips. And my father loved history, so he would talk about Ephesus and everything that happened. And I remember just being bored of, out of my head [laughter], and so I must have like looked really bored and my dad was like, you know, what’s going on?
And I was like, I wanna go home. And he said, well, why don’t you imagine how people lived here thousands of years ago in, you know, and the streets of Ephesus are lined with marble and you can see, still see the marks of the chariot's wheels. And he was like, you see those grooves, those were made by chariots and you know, chariots were these, you know, vehicles with horses and Roman soldiers and this and that.
And started describing it to me and I think that’s the first time I realized the power of imagination. And that really changed my perspective and I started imagining things that were not in front of my eyes, but inside my head.
AD: Hmm, and how old were you when you had that?
AB: I was like five.
AD: Wow! Wow! And what a formative experience that was and visualization clearly is a big part of your work now.
AB: My super power, yes! My super powers are being visual and solving problems visually.
AD: Oh my gosh, that’s amazing. I wanna hear about this, this seven year old Ayse that you greet every morning and why that’s important that you say hello to your inner child?
AB: [Laughs] I’ll tell you a little anecdote. I used to walk from home to school by myself and I was a little kid, right? But between home and school there as another school, the French school that my mother would send me every now and then. And so one spring day, it must have been around this time of the year, it was beautiful, and instead of going directly to school I stopped by the French school and went into their garden.
And I don’t think anybody knows about this, except now you and your listeners. My mom doesn’t know [laughs], but I went to the garden in the back and the garden was all fully grown with wild flowers, it was incredibly beautiful and these flowers came up almost to my height. And in among those flowers there were these beautiful little red ladybugs, just kind of flying around and I remember, to this day, running around inside those flowers and running after the little red bugs, you know, ladybugs.
And I did that and it felt great. Came back out, went to school and it’s just that spirit of that little girl that did something without telling anyone and felt, feeling completely in control, very independent, very like, this is my life and I’m enjoying it and I’m running around in flowers and among ladybugs. To me that’s my essence in being a grownup, every now and then I need to reach back into that essence and say, are you still there? [Laughs]
AD: I love that so much and I felt for a second like I was running around with the ladybugs with you.
AB: Oh, that’s beautiful, that’s beautiful.
AD: So, tell me how the seven year old progressed into teenage years and when you took your love of drawing and playfulness and visualization and kind of understood that it might become industrial design? I mean were you still thinking you’d be a lawyer or were you rebelling against that in your teenage years? What were those like?
AB: In a funny way my parents were incredibly supportive of my decision to, they didn’t insist, like my dad didn’t insist, oh, you need to become a lawyer. Now, being a parent, I really appreciate what it takes for a parent to just stand back and let your kid decide what they wanna do.
AD: Yeah, that’s got to be rough! [Laughter]
AB: And especially like industrial design, right, at the time industrial design, especially in Turkey was a very young profession and the way that I found out about it is -
AD: It’s still very misunderstood, I think.
AB: Oh, very misunderstood, to this day. I was thinking of doing architecture and a friend of my family came to tea and talked to me about industrial design and the way this took place is, we were having tea and he asked me, “Do you know what industrial design is?” And I was like no, and he said, “Look, this teacup that we’re using, how the edges curved, so that it fits on our lips better and it has a handle so we can hold hot liquid in our hands without burning ourselves and the saucer is there, it’s designed so that if you spill your tea you won’t ruin your mother’s beautiful tablecloth.”
And just that description of industrial design, that something thought about the relationship of an object to a person mesmerized me and I thought, that’s what I want to do. And I fell in love with the human scale of industrial design. And to this day I’m in love with it and that was the beginning.
AD: I don’t remember a specific anecdote like that, but I know when I started to realize how the built world comes together around me and that humans were responsible for making every decision, you know, in terms of how cities are laid out, how buildings get built, why things are the way they are. And every product that I interfaced with and I started to get so fascinated in all of those decisions.
And also so confounded that it’s still so misunderstood by so many people, even though there are so many people hard at work on the built world. And when you had this magical moment with that teacup, the fact that you had a direct connection to a field of study, I think is really important. I wish that more young people understood that industrial design is something you can go off to school and study.
We’ve talked to so many people who don’t discover it until they get to college and they’re fishing around for a major. How old were you when you had this teacup revelation?
AB: I was 15.
AD: Fifteen, perfect [laughs]. So that gave you some structure to your teenage years because you had a destination to work toward.
AB: It really did and I was so determined to study industrial design that in Turkey you had this university exam, somewhat similar to SATs, but a little bit different in that you would enter the exam and make a list of the schools you want to go into. And depending on what you got from your score, from the exam, you could get your top choice or you could get into your 20th choice, I think it had like 25 options. And I remember, put down just one school and it was Middle East Technical University Industrial Design Department. And I left all of it open and so it was kind of like, hit or miss [laughter].
AD: I will do this and I will do only this!
AB: Luckily I got in, thank god.
AD: What were the college years like?
AB: The college years were amazing. I mean I feel like that's when I really came into my own. I just loved the studio environment, being on my own in Ankara, where my parents were in Izmir and I lived in Ankara for the first time, kind of as like this mini adult Ayse and all people were asking me to do was think creatively and I loved every minute of it. I felt like I found a missing piece of myself. Yeah, it was just great and I met some amazing people. You know, some of my best friends are still from those years and -
AD: From what I understand, you also landed a Fulbright at Pratt and that brought you to New York City?
AB: Amy, you did your research! How when I look back on it I’m like, how did that happen?
AD: How did that happen? I mean obviously you applied for it and you were granted it, but did you have your sight set on New York City?
AB: It was actually a piece of rebellion on my part because my parents always told me, like you could go and do your master’s in the States and this is kind of with, I guess in Turkey a lot of families try to send their kids to Europe or the States, kind of for a higher education and you know, learning a second or third language. And as an ideal I really had that in my head that if I’m, you know, if I graduate and if I’m a good student, I’ll get to go to the States.
But as my graduation day kind of approached, I could see that my parents were hesitating and you know, the idea of, I was a young graduate, I was 20 years old when I graduated from Middle East Technical. And I could see that they were hesitating about sending their daughter all the way to the States. And I thought to myself, I need to find an alternative way and I applied for a Fulbright, I got it [laughs].
And then I was like, okay, I don’t know if you’re sending me, but I’m going.
AD: You designed yourself a parent-acceptable path to going to New York City.
AB: I did and you know, again, my parents were incredibly supportive, but I just wanted to kind of, I guess, that’s part of the independence that was also drilled into me. I was like, okay, let me do this and the other thing about Pratt that was so interesting. Like the choice of New York, like to this day I can’t tell you why New York, but there was something inside me that just kept on saying, you need to go to New York.
And so it’s a dream come true for me but also I had an art teacher in high school who was a graduate of Pratt and who, industrial design by the way, who would try and explain to me the principles of basic design and three dimensional design as it’s taught at Pratt. And the whole curriculum of, for those people, designers who know Rowena Reed, Rowena Reed Kostellow’s, her three dimensional design education, which is an incredible education and quite unique.
But anyways, I remember being like 13/14/15 and my art teacher trying to explain these things to me. And I didn’t understand one bit of what he was saying. And [laughs] until I came to Pratt.
AD: You kind of got a double Pratt education, you got primed for it at 13/14/15 and then you got the real deal.
AB: Exactly and Amy I have to tell you, I didn’t realize the connection many years later as I was like talking about it. And suddenly it clicked in my head that I was like, hold on one second, that’s the wire exercise he was trying to teach me. The negative space that he was trying to get me to understand as a young kid, I was like, I don’t know what he’s talking about. There’s positive and negative space, what?
Those were like all Rowena’s teachings and then Rowena became my teacher at Pratt and actually my first friend in New York. And so that’s kind of like a full circle.
AD: Oh my gosh, that’s totally full circle. And foreshadowing, it’s so magical how life does that sometimes.
AB: Yeah, yeah.
AD: So after graduation, I mean did you know you were gonna stay in New York City? Did you feel homesick? Did you, what were your first few steps into the professional world like and were you feeling wobbly or surefooted?
AB: Here, here’s my take on New York. When you come to New York as a foreigner, the first year you’re so excited and you’re like, oh my god, this is amazing and so the first year goes by really fast and quite happy. The second year is kind of, it sinks into you that you’re far away from home and it’s really hard to make friends and people are too busy in New York running around and chasing their dreams.
And so the second year is usually quite depressive, so I was depressed and [laughs], you know, sleeping until you know, noon and kind of dreaming of my family and my friends back in Turkey and, without realizing that that’s, you know, being depressed feels like. And then the third year is, if you’re still here, that’s when you love New York and you become a New Yorker and I stayed for the third year and that’s when I graduated and I’m still here, 30 years later.
Yes, and the thing that made a huge difference for me was as I was graduating, the chair of industrial design at the time was Bruce Hannah and he’s my professor and he was an amazing teacher. And he asked me if I wanted to work on a project with him. And so that was my entry to industrial design, professionally, was incredibly smooth. Thanks to Bruce.
AD: Yes, what a major validation as well.
AB: You wouldn’t believe it. It was quite incredible and it was actually a project that Bruce was doing for Knoll. He was designing office accessories and I got to meet Andrew Cogan, who was 27 at the time and he’s now the CEO of Knoll and we became friends. So I was like 24, he was 27 and then Bruce was this amazing mentor. So that actually went beautifully. And when Knoll introduced the Orchestra office accessory collection, Bruce gave me credit and it came out as Bruce Hannah Ayse Birsel Collection and I thought, wow, this is amazing and this is so easy [laughs]. Little did I know that that was just a -
AD: Well, yeah, you have to tell me, with a shoehorn like that into the professional world, did you have some hard knocks after that? Without being guided into the professional space, so -
AB: Yes I did! [Laughs]
AD: Okay, let’s hear about that because I feel like those epic challenges, they temper us, right, that’s what helps us learn and become resilient.
AB: I hope that the moment that we’re in is also teaching us some great lessons [laughs]. That was actually a great entryway in the profession and I was young enough and stupid enough to think, oh, this is great, I’ll just start my own studio and then I’ll have clients like Knoll and Andrew and collaborators like Bruce. And, and then for the next two and a half, three years, I had no clients. I could barely make ends meet and I freelanced here and there.
And was really quite desperate and thought, okay, so maybe I should become a lawyer and you know, this design thing is really hard [laughs]. So that was my kind of glamorous entry and then kind of learning my place.
AD: Well, I mean how seriously did you actually entertain the idea of becoming a lawyer? I know that it was in your DNA from your family, so it may have felt like a choice that was safe, but it’s hard to be a lawyer too?
AB: It’s hard to be a lawyer too and luckily another friend came to my help. I feel like you know, you’re always saved by your friends, so Bruce gave me my first opportunity and then when I was really feeling desperate, Tucker Viemeister, it turns out, Tucker Viemeister was one of the co-founders of Smart Design and he became a friend. And so he was participating in this seminar, a worldwide seminar, that Total Japan, the Total bathroom company was putting together in Japan, about the culture of bathrooms basically.
And so unbeknownst to me, Tucker enters my thesis project, which was called the Water Room and it was a concept project around bathrooms. He sends them my project and says, “You should invite this woman to the seminar.” So I got invited! And Tucker was there and I was there and some you know, world famous designers were there to talk about bathrooms.
And I was kind of like the Turkish designer who had done this conceptual bathroom and you know, Turkey and Turkish culture is very well known for their bath culture. So that was kind of why I ended up there. But that changed my life, you know. I didn’t, as you can see, I didn’t become a lawyer - after that, ended up living in Japan and working for TOTO for a year.
AD: Yeah, toilets became a big part of your repertoire.
AB: Yeah, yes, they did. I became known as the queen of toilets [laughter], yes.
AD: An award winning queen of toilets -
AB: [Laughs] Yes, and a designer of what’s unofficially known as the world’s most comfortable toilet seat.
AD: Oh? That’s quite a contribution to society.
AB: It really is, not, not many people can say they’ve designed toilets and, and I like that distinction. [Laughter]
AD: So when you were working with TOTO, were you already an independent designer? Had you started your studio?
AB: I had started my studio actually right after the Knoll Orchestra collection came out, thinking this is how things are done, but also because I had always seen my dad, who was an independent lawyer, he had his own small law firm in Turkey. He was my model and example, I thought, okay, that’s how things are done.
So even when I knew nothing, I had my studio. But then going to TOTO and living in Japan for a year really formed me. It’s my army service. I felt like [laughs] I was a soldier, a designer soldier in Japan and where I really had to fight for my ideas because I was a foreigner, I was young, I was a woman -
AD: Oh, all of it, yeah.
AB: All of it and in an environment, like all those years ago where people didn’t really want to listen to me and I really had to fight to make innovation happen.
AD: Can you describe that fight? Like what was your strategy, your tactics?
AB: So the way it happened is, in the beginning I just developed some concepts and you know, they were not supposed to go much of anywhere, we were ideating. But then I hit upon an idea of, TOTO was interested in developing products for the American market. This was before TOTO became such a well-known brand in the States and they were looking for an entryway into the American market.
And they thought; hold on a second, instead of having this woman think about concepts, why don’t we have her design, since she’s coming from the States, why don’t we have her design a product for the American market? And they said, we want you to design a washlet, basically a toilet seat with a bidet function inside it for the American market.
So we start with that and then I develop it. I work in Tokyo at their design office and at the end of the first three months we have this beautiful prototype that we share with their CEO and top three executives. And they approve it and then they say okay, now Ayse, since you’re the designer, you’re going to take this to our factory in Kokura, in the Kyushu Island, in the southern island, and you’re going to work with our engineers and make this toilet, you know, into a product.
So I go to you know, Kokura, which was, like I’m already in Tokyo, then I’m going to Kokura, a very different environment. It’s kind of like a quiet, it’s kind of like Izmir actually, a little port city. And so I explained to the engineers, we had this first meeting and I said, here are the things we need to change based on this design, this and this and this and this and this. And they looked at me and they said, no to this, no to this, no to this, no to this.
And they went through my list and said no to everything that made that design what, what it was, the innovation that it was. And things like -
AD: Because it would require tooling and things that they just weren’t familiar with?
AB: They didn’t even explain it, but it was things like, one of, just to give you an example. One of my ideas was to make the seat and the lid basically detachable, snap on, snap off, so that you could actually snap the lid, snap the seat, wash under the faucet and then put it back on again because I knew, you know, how to clean toilets and that wasn’t an easy thing to do. So this was an innovation.
AD: Yeah.
AB: And they were like, no, we’re not gonna do that. This is how we’ve always done things and this is how we’re always gonna do things. And I thought to myself, okay, well that doesn’t make sense. And [laughs] so I sat down and I thought to myself, Ayse, you’re here, you know, you left your life in New York, you’re all by yourself in Kokura and the executives approved your design and all these engineers are basically saying no to you.
You can’t go back home without having done what you came here to do. You know, after all that you’ve sacrificed, so get your act together, I told myself [laughs]. And you know, I was young, sometimes you’re really courageous when you’re young. So I wrote a letter to the chief executive, like chief design person who had approved the design.
And he was an older Japanese gentleman. I wrote him a handwritten letter at the time [laughs]. And I said, look, your team is not accepting the things that you approved me to do. I need your help. Three days later we have a meeting and they said yes to everything I asked for.
AD: Oh, you pulled rank!
AB: I did! [Laughter]
AD: Yes, but you were in a spot, because they were too comfortable discounting you and what you were there to do.
AB: They were.
AD: Yeah.
AB: They hated my guts, which is -
AD: Because you forced them to innovate. People don’t, people resist change and -
AB: They really do, yeah.
AD: But that went on to become a very, a very successful product for the company, right, and so -
AB: It did and you know, we won all kinds of awards and it was, you know, on the covers of design magazines and in the New York Times magazine. It was all kinds of good stuff. It also led to my entry to working with Herman Miller, you know, a story that is 20 years long. So it was, for me, it was, I’m glad I stood my ground.
AD: Yes, yes, and that long relationship with Herman Miller has been, it’s been a fruitful relationship for, for both.
AB: While I was freelancing I met a young design manager, Leia Kaplan, who was younger than myself, but totally knew how to manage projects and organize ideas. And to this day she’s one of my oldest and closest collaborators. She still tells me what to do and I listen to her. But anyways, Leia Kaplan and I became friends. And one day she said, “You know Ayse, I want you to meet my dad,” and I’m like, who is your dad?
And she said, “Ralph Kaplan,” and I adored Ralph Kaplan. Ralph Kaplan was the editor in chief of ID Magazine at the time. And he had written this beautiful seminal book on design called By Design, which I would recommend all of your listeners, if they haven’t read it, to read it. It’s an amazing, and actually a funny, because Ralph is very humorous, a funny book on design.
So then I meet Ralph and Ralph says, “Hmm, interesting, I think you need to meet my friends at Herman Miller,” and that’s how I got introduced to Herman Miller. But then when I met the people at Herman Miller, their executives, I was this young woman, with this toilet experience in my pocket, but at the time the product hadn’t come out yet.
I couldn’t show them the product, I could tell them about the product. So kind of like the way I’ve done with you, I told them some of the product stories. And a couple of days later they told me, we’re interested, we like how you think, we’re interested in working with you. And years later they told me, it was actually Don Goeman, Herman Miller’s design director, for many, many years, and I’ve collaborated with him almost on all my projects at Herman Miller.
Anyways, he said, “Ayse, you know the reason we hired you is because we figured if you can work with Japanese engineers on innovative products, you could work with our engineers in Michigan, that’s why we hired you.” [Laughs]
AD: So wow, wow, so standing your ground and fighting that fight really was a very important chapter in your life.
AB: It really was.
AD: Not to overinflate it, but I think it’s a really important story just in terms of young female designers not being so easily discounted.
AB: I’m so glad you’re saying that, I think so. I never understood why there are not more industrial designers, female industrial designers. I think we’re very good at what we do, design is teamwork. We’re very good team builders and we collaborate very well. Most women designers and professionals I know are also very humanistic and empathic.
You know, some of design qualities are imbedded in our nature and that’s not to say men don’t have that. It’s just that I think women also do have it and in spades. And so it always surprises me why more companies don’t choose, and especially, let’s add, you know, the greater percentage of consumers are also women. You know, why wouldn’t you hire women designers?
And this goes to the point you made in the beginning about how few people understand what design is all about. And what it takes. My theory is that for more women designers to be employed, we need more executives to understand when and why they need design. And as you know, these decisions are made at the C level, at the chief you know, CEO level or chief marketing office or chief design officer levels.
Most of them are men and so either they need to be men who trust women or they need women who trust women. And without that, it’s really hard to convince, because design is very much based on mutual trust, because it’s quite an investment, you know. You put a lot of money into new products, it’s quite risky because until it comes out, you don’t know how it’s gonna turn out.
It doesn’t take a couple of weeks, you know, a design project usually takes, you know, unless it’s UX design, but even then, you know, from six months to a year to two years, three years, you know, automobiles take up to five years. So a long answer to say there’s much trust building that’s needed and, and I have this funny theory about, you know, men build trust by going to a sports bar and watching sports together and women build trust by going to the bathroom together.
AD: Oh!
AB: [Laughs] So, so it’s, it’s not that easy and you know - most men executives are not gonna invite a woman to come to a sports bar with them and most you know, and if you don’t have a lot of women executives to have, kind of personal conversations with, it makes that, it slows that trust building down, so.
AD: I agree with you. I think there’s a generational component to it as well. I think sons that grow up witnessing the power of strong mothers in the workforce are more inclined to, when they become men of power, are more inclined to understand the, the capabilities of women, do you think?
AB: I do. And I used to also say men who are in leadership positions who have daughters, strong daughters growing up, into independent and powerful women, are much more sympathetic of what women need.
AD: Yes, and what they need to lead. I love this conversation and I think, you know, the value of design and all those decisions that are made at the C level, I think in both corporations and capitalist society, but also in governance, in cities and state and federal government, we need chief design officers to help strategize and innovate in order to stay resilient and adaptive. And I think, you know, the real challenge is changing cultural perception of the value of design. And I think 3M has done a great job and they have a chief design officer and a few cities -
AB: Yes, Eric Quint.
AD: Yes.
AB: Yes, a good friend of mine.
AD: Back to you, there’s also a very powerful love story that rides along with your love of industrial design. I definitely wanna hear that story.
AB: I would be happy to tell you. As you can see, I owe everything to industrial design [laughs], including love. So, we’ll go fast forward to you know, I had a great partnership with Herman Miller, that still continues and designs, the first project actually I designed for Herman Miller was the Resolve Office System. And so that in itself is a podcast, so we’ll leave that story to another time.
But as I was emerging from Resolve, Resolve was, really changed the paradigm of office systems and with that gave me more freedom in terms of choosing my clients. I really wanted to work with Renault, the French automobile manufacturer, because I loved what they were doing in terms of their innovations. And had this idea, kind of dream in my head and I got to meet the chief design officer and eventually got a project with them.
And so they asked me to design a concept interior for them, from the perspective of an industrial designer. So industrial design, even though it’s design of products, is different from automobile design. Automobile design is quite specialized. And so it was interesting because they felt like, okay, how does an industrial designer, an industrial designer who designs office systems see automobile design and kind of see things differently from us.
And I thought, great, I’ve been dying to work with you, this is exactly what I’ve been hoping for. But I said, but I know nothing about cars and I need somebody from your side, a designer from your side to mentor me. And they said, okay, that’s an interesting idea. And we’re going to send you one of our best designers, Bibi Seck, and you’re going to love him.
And apparently they told Bibi the same thing. Bibi was between projects and they told Bibi, “You’re going to New York for three weeks to work with this woman and by the way, you’re going to love her.” [Laughs] So that’s the love story, that’s what happened. We listened to our client [laughter] and so I fell in love with Bibi and vice versa and we became partners in life and at work.
AD: Wow, that’s more foreshadowing and was it electric, those three weeks of learning about cars and learning about each other?
AB: Oh, three months.
AD: Three months?
AB: Yeah, three months.
AD: You seem to have had a lot of kismet in your life.
AB: I did, yeah, knock on wood [laughs], it’s -
AD: So for context, when was that, that you and Bibi fell in love?
AB: We fell in love, that was about, it was right after /911, so 2002.
AD: How long did it take you to figure out that you were also going to form a design studio together and do life and all the other things that happen in life together?
AB: It happened pretty quickly because we kind of fell in love designing together. So, and I loved how Bibi thought and designed and drew and we had to make a choice because I lived in New York and I had a successful design studio in New York and Bibi had, you know, his home was Paris and he was very successful. He had designed, when I met him, he had designed four automobiles for Renault and garnered a whole list of awards.
So [laughs], so he was very successful doing what he was doing, but he was in Paris. So we had to make a decision, like are we, am I moving to Paris or is he coming to New York. And as you know, I’m calling you from New York, so you can tell that Bibi came to New York [laughter].
AD: That sounds magical, your life really does have some, yeah, some elements of real, this other worldly charm.
AB: Amy, you bring it out [laughter], it’s just a pedestrian, normal life, but the way you ask the questions, it makes it magical, but thank you.
AD: So, I wanna fast forward, so right after 2011 you fall in love, you form, you know, your studio Birsel + Seck, which you’re still working together and doing amazing industrial design and also raising children, three of them. Life is sort of travelling along at a pretty great clip and then the 2008 recession happens.
AB: Crash! [Laughs]
AD: Yes, you know, you gave a pretty powerful TED Talk about how that made you reevaluate and look at all the parts and pieces of your life in a different way, which gave birth to your Design the Life You Love chapter and book and movement. And I would love to hear you deconstruct that chapter of your life for us.
AB: Just like you said, we were incredibly successful and then the economic crash happened and all our clients took the work in-house, which made completely economic sense from their perspective, but meant devastation for us. And I remember feeling very, very responsible because I was like, I convinced Bibi to leave his, you know, great job at Renault and come and partner with me in New York, promised him all these things and now like we didn’t have clients, we didn’t have income, we had three kids and what do you do?
So the person that came to my help again was Leia Kaplan, who sat me down one day and said look you think differently. So you have all this time now, you don’t have any client projects, why don’t you use this time to think about how you think and that was the beginning of the self-discovery of me as a designer kind of going inside my brain and figuring out what every project, what do I do that helps me come up with these ideas.
And so I spent a year figuring that out and you know, showing it to my friends, to Leia and others and simplifying it and trying to understand what is it that they don’t understand about this very simple process, and, because they would look at it and they’d go like, huh? And so until I had like this four step design process that I called Deconstruction:Reconstruction, and that, again, was kind of, I didn’t know it at the time, but it was the beginning of this change of one, I had a design process and next interview I had was with GE and I showed them the Deconstruction:Reconstruction as part of our, you know, how we think, for the first time.
And with that they gave us this, quite a large project that I don’t think they would have given us if it wasn’t for our process. And they basically said, why don’t you deconstruct and reconstruct value of design across all of GE and tell us what you find out. So that was amazing.
AD: Whoa!
AB: And then the second thing happened, to your point about Design the Life You Love is I had years before, around the time that I had a little bit before I met Bibi actually, I was part of a group of women called Women Presidents Organization. And we had done an exercise where we had to kind of create one sentence about our mission statement. And I happened to say, “My mission is to design the life I love.” And Amy, that stuck with me. I don’t know why I said it. And I was trying to be somewhat kind of funny and kind of say something about design.
But that kind of followed me and so fast forward to 2008/2009, I had Deconstruction:Reconstruction and suddenly this notion of designing your life and our life is our biggest project. I had a design process, now can I apply that to my life and what would that look like. And then this friend of mind, Shirley Moulton comes along and says, “Well, that sounds like a really interesting idea, why don’t you do a workshop around that for my company called Academy of Life.” And before I knew it, I started doing workshops.
I had never done workshops before, but I, my first workshop was on teaching people how to apply design process and tools to their life. And I’ve been doing it ever since, as my passion project [laughs]. And so that’s what happened.
AD: Yeah and I can imagine the passion, it must feel so rewarding and fulfilling to have that one-to-one relationship with humans and empower them to actually see what they’re not seeing in their lives and, and design it with intention.
AB: It’s unbelievable and it’s actually something that we really need right now, now that we’re in this very different and much bigger crises with the COVID-19 virus, but I’ll come to that. I just wanted to share with you that you know, earlier we talked about design and how many people don’t understand industrial design and I often joke about like, most companies, they know when they need a lawyer. They know when they need a plumber, but nobody knows when they need an industrial designer [laughs].
AD: It’s so true! It’s so true and I go around pointing it out. Like you guys really need a designer and they’re like, what? Like, to fluff pillows and like paint, choose a paint color and I’m just like, ohhh!
AB: Exactly, but, so then when I tell people hey, I also teach people how to Design the Life They Love and I wrote a book about it, people immediately go, oh, when is your next workshop, when is your next session? Can you do that for our corporation/company, for my team? It’s just crazy. So there’s something that is incredibly organic and natural for us, when we think about, oh, we can design our life, we can design our work.
We then become, our sense of design in that context makes total sense and we’re drawn to it. And what I’ve learned actually is that ordinary people, people who have no design background, I affectionately call them ‘ordinary people.’ They’re incredibly extraordinarily creative and all they need is a design process, just like any one of us.
AD: Yeah.
AB: They want to know, okay, how do I do this and so that’s been a huge part of my life, and like you said, it allows me to connect with individuals. It allows me to see how people transform their lives and turn constraints into opportunities and kind of imagine their life with intention and with empathy and optimism.
AD: It’s quite a public service too. I believe, no, I’m a big believer that everyone has, is creative, but -
AB: Yes.
AD: So many people in their own non-believing of their own creativity, you know that phrase, ‘oh, I don’t have a creative bone in my body.’ Which is so not true -
AB: Yeah, all our bones are creative actually.
AD: Yeah [laughter] and I believe if everyone gave themselves permission to explore and own their creativity, that in general as a society we’d have a much greater capacity for complex problem solving.
AB: I wholeheartedly believe that as well and one thing about design that I didn’t know, but I learned from one of my dear friends, Alex Osterwalder is that he said, most business people, they think there’s only one solution to a problem. So they do a lot of research and then they go and look for that one solution. In fact, there are many solutions to one problem and you have to try a couple of them, prototype them to see which one is the right one or which ones can be combined to become the right one.
So, I thought everybody did that, like as a designer you think of multiple solutions until you figure out which one is the right one. Apparently that’s not the case and most business education doesn’t teach you to think in that multiple faceted way.
AD: So that is interesting cause I kind of take it for granted to that everybody is sort of moving all the parts and pieces around to find a number of different workable solutions. And then reverse engineering it to like, well, what is actually doable from where we are now and then sort of connecting the dots.
AB: Exactly and that’s, for example for us as designers, trying something and seeing it not work, that’s not failure, that’s just part and parcel of what you do. That’s information, that’s how you find out, you know -
AD: More data to put into the hopper to make a better solution.
AB: Exactly, so I used to be confused about, like everybody talking about like fail fast, fail safe, fail this and that, like accept to fail. I’m like, of course, so it slowly dawned on me in these conversations with Alex also helped me is that most business education and framing is teaching you not to fail because if you fail, you know, you lose money, you lose face, you lose employees. But it’s this notion that you can be prototyping multiple ideas without investing a lot of time and money. That’s a skill? [Laughter] To all the leaders out there, that’s why, one of the reasons why you need designers. I actually wrote a whole article on when and why to call designers and did a poster about it that I could share with you if you’d like to share it with your listeners.
AD: Absolutely!
AB: And then one day I was talking to Alan Mulally who was the great CEO of Ford Motors and he said, oh yeah, that poster, that poster is on my wall and he sent me a photograph of it.
AD: I love that! [Laughter]
AB: So thank you Alan.
AD: So, I wanna talk to you about this creative process that you’ve mentioned, Deconstruction:Reconstruction. You go into your four point process and your TED Talk and in your book and we also know that the 2008 economic crash was a really turbulent time, which is what kind of led to you, you know, really, really analyzing yourself and doing the self-reflection needed to kind of really detail out this process. And I think that now we are in an unprecedented crazy global pandemic, obviously everybody’s lives are turned on end and we have economic uncertainty in front of us and certainly a whole lot of grief to process and I think that your creative process could be so helpful to so many people. I wonder if you can explain it and maybe explain it within the context of what we’re going through now, how people can think about using it in their own lives.
AB: You’re absolutely right. I don’t think we could have imagined being in this situation, if somebody had explained to us a year ago, like next year this is how you’re going to live. I don’t think our minds could have grasped it. But here we are and, so Deconstruction:Reconstruction is about deconstructing the whole to see what something is made up of. And then the second step is point of view, it’s how can we look at those same parts differently and see them from a new angle.
And then the third step is reconstruction, putting the pieces back together, knowing you can’t have everything, so what are your essentials, what are your nice to haves, what are the things you want to get rid of. And then the fourth step is expressing it, giving this design form. So how are you going to bring these things to life?
And in this moment, I find that so many of us are re-evaluating our lives and looking at you know, what’s essential to my life. What do I want to have learned from this moment in history so that when I come out of it, I am true to myself and I know what the things I want to keep are and what the things I want to get rid of are and some of the transformation.
So to that end, we started, when the pandemic started and we, in New York about a month ago started sheltering in place, together with my team we thought, well, what can we do. And the first thing that came to our minds was how could we bring our Design the Life You Love community together and could we be of service to them and if so, how?
So we reached out to them and said, what can we do, like would you be interested in designing your life in this moment? And we weren’t sure, like they, they could have thought, well, that’s the last thing I want to do right now, but they came back and they were like, that would be so amazing because we’re all trying to figure out our lives right now. So we started doing these 5:00 teas every Wednesday for an hour on Zoom.
Where people who have done the class or read the book and people who have never designed their lives but are interested in this moment to think about their lives, like designers. We all get together and, virtually of course, and I give one prompt from the process a week and we also have a guest and we talk about, with each guest, we talk about the different facets of our experience or emotion.
And we do one creative exercise to think about our situation differently. And like designers, so with optimism, knowing that we’ll come out of this and we’ll be better for it and how can we make that happen? And with empathy for ourselves and for each other and with collaboration. So how can we help each other think differently? So that’s been quite [1.10.00] amazing and I thought I was doing it for my community. It turns out I’m doing it very selfishly. It’s the best thing [laughs] that you know, every week, for me to do.
And then we’re also kind of fuelled by that now, going back to our clients and saying this is a time for redesign, how can we help you. And also putting together webinar in doing the creative session online rather than in person which is what we always did, but now taking it virtual. And I can give you some examples. It’s quite amazing how creative people are.
AD: Yes, examples, illustrations would be great, anything to make it kind of concrete so that we can visualize it too.
AB: Absolutely! So, we’ll start with deconstruction. When you deconstruct something, you can see what it’s made up of, but what you’re also doing is you’re breaking preconceptions about how you see the world. So, just for one of my examples, because I try, I always try my exercises myself to just one, generate examples but also to think about, almost like get out of my own head and to think about my life differently.
So I did a deconstruction of my life right now and one of the things, and anybody could try this at home. But one of the things, building blocks of my life I wanted to deconstruct was wellbeing. So I thought, okay, I’m moping around the house thinking I’m sheltering in place. So let me understand what’s my wellbeing made up of. And so I listed kind of mind-mapped, my wellbeing and I said my family, my home, my health, my work, thinking creatively, you know, doing some physical exercise, this and this and that.
Travelling with my family and hanging out with my friends. Long example short, what that simple deconstruction of just wellbeing made me realize is that actually I’m complaining a lot, but almost all the pieces of my wellbeing, thank God, are still in place. You know, my family is here, Bibi was almost stuck in Dakar, Senegal, when he had a great project going on and they closed the airports and he almost couldn’t come back.
But then he did, so I’m grateful that he’s here, the kids are here and I realized that you know, I have, yes, this is a difficult moment, but I can still say the essential elements of my wellbeing are here. So that’s one thing.
Then in terms of things to throw out, like one kind of funny example is like, I realized that I’m a busy person, like you are a busy person. Every week an hour, at least an hour of my time went to the hairdresser because I have curly hair and I need to like, and I don’t like doing it myself. So I go to a hairdresser that I love downstairs from me and right now I can’t go see him and I’m, you know, I just pull back my hair in a ponytail and that’s an extra hour of my time.
And in the process I also realized that I actually forget about myself if I can help somebody in this time. So if I can call somebody, hear how they’re doing or coach somebody or mentor somebody, or simply like be there for a friend. And I thought to myself, you know, one thing you could do going forward is that you’re not going to be so vain about your hair, going forward. And use that time, after you come out, to go have coffee with a friend or anyone for an hour and just listen to them. So [laughs] -
AD: I love that example.
AB: So if you see my hair all kind of [laughs], Ayse and a bad hair day, I’m helping someone. So I wanna see if I can make that happen, you know.
AD: Yes, but I also love that example because it might, you know, depending on how you apply it to your life, it might be different for someone else Someone who doesn’t normally take the time, maybe they spend the time on childcare and they don’t spend the time taking care of themselves and they would feel so nice if they had more good hair days, you know? Their decision might be the exact opposite of yours which is, I’m going to take that hour that I usually spend running errands and I’m gonna spend it on myself, doing something that makes me feel good about myself.
AB: Absolutely and you know, it’s a very individual choice, right?
AD: Yeah.
AB: So when we started doing the teas, frankly I was a little bit worried because like you said, we’re all in different places and some of us are grieving, grieving differently. They’re not necessarily with their loved ones or the health is a big issue. There are people who have had really hardships and losses. And I was like, I don’t know if I have answers for all those things but what happens is when we get together for an hour, people help each other.
So what we do is, one of the tools is how can we turn constraints into opportunities and so people write their constraints and challenges in the chat box in Zoom. And then another person gives them ideas. So things like this came up, which were really moving. So one person said, my boyfriend is quarantined in a different place and you know, I’m really sad and another person offered her the idea of, well, why don’t you express your love for him and write him old-style love letters every day because we don’t write love letters anymore.
And another person said, I don’t know how to, you know, my 90 year old moms birthday is coming up and I can’t go see her and you know, make a cake for her, what do I do? And a bunch of people in the group responded by saying, why don’t you order a cake for her and then everybody in her community also makes a cake and you can all kind of hop on a Zoom call and blow out the candles together. How about you paint a painting, like invite your family and friends to do something for her, like paint a painting or do a little embroidery or something that is, again, like DIY.
That sense of collaboration also, that creativity of, I don’t have the answer, but somebody else might have the answer and together we might one, share, two, find new solutions.
AD: Yes and those teas sound amazing, I want to come to -
AB: Of course, I’ll send you the link. It’s open to any; we’re really opening it up to everyone who is interested. So if there are people who are listening and want to come to it, they can email me or they can email Birsel + Seck and we can put them on our mailing list.
AD: Oh, that is amazing and we will include that information in our show notes so that people can find it.
AB: Great.
AD: So your process of deconstruction point of view, reconstruction and expression is all geared toward what seems to me like an outcome of exponential generativity and by that I mean what is making you feel good is also a service to society in that you’re listening to people, you’re creating situations that are really fulfilling for you, but they’re fulfilling for other people. And when they’re coming together in this way to fulfil themselves, they’re coming up with ideas that end up helping people and there must be a hotspot you can see from space over these sessions [laughs].
But that exponential generativity is the equation that happens when you do something that feels really amazing for you, that also ends up bettering other people because then they also go, learn from that and go out and make their lives better, which makes other people’s lives better. Do you see what I’m saying?
AB: I know what you say and as I was listening to you Amy, it’s beautiful what you’re saying. I was thinking, and that’s design. So design is all about, and maybe that’s where you were leading us to is, how can we solve problems collaboratively and with empathy and optimism and with an open mind so that we can better our lives and it could be through designing your life or designing your work and it’s just you, your life, your work and the design process. And just to be able to generate solutions for it and the sense of power and control that gives to someone, to be able to do that.
Or to do it through the intermediary of products and services and experiences. And I don’t know if we’ve run out of time but this also is a great time for businesses, not only, it’s not a great time, it’s a fundamental need for businesses right now to deconstruct and reconstruct themselves. And we see some of this happening naturally around businesses that surround us, one of them being the restaurant business, for example.
You know, they are deconstructing themselves and then looking at this catalyst of the coronavirus and saying, what’s essential, what’s something we need to get rid of in this moment and how are we going to reconstruct ourselves and reinvent ourselves and they’re turning into corner stores or they’re turning into drive-thru’s, or online cooking classes. That kind of transformation is truly what’s needed and that’s what design is, that’s what we do.
AD: So I have a serious question for you.
AB: I thought all your questions were very serious and lovely but okay, a very serious question.
AD: Well, I mean it’s serious because it’s about playfulness and -
AB: Oh, okay!
AD: You describe playfulness as that essence of yourself, that seven year old girl running or the, yeah, seven year old girl running through the wild flowers -
AB: Yeah.
AB: Without telling her mom.
AD: Right-
AB: Yeah [laughter]. Don’t tell my kids.
AD: It’s all your own. But you also describe playfulness as an important lens through which to view all the parts of your life that you’ve deconstructed - In the point of view part of the process, how do you, when we’re so consumed with fear and anxiety and a lot of resistance and a lot of grief, how do we get to that place of playful perspective?
AB: Being playful helps us kind of break our own preconceptions, things that we assume to be true. And it’s especially needed in these moments where problems are so serious. So wrong thinking is one of my favorite examples and wrong thinking is about how could you come up with the worst possible idea and then walk backwards from that, or forward from that to a good idea?
So you know, one terrible idea is, for example, what if you gossiped about everybody at work, that’s a terrible idea. But what if you spread good gossip? What if you talked about people and actually told great stories about what wonderful people they are, even when they’re not in the room? That would be taking a terrible idea, gossip, and turning it on its head and making it a great idea.
So, I feel like here in this moment we’re pushed into a terrible idea. We didn’t create it, but we find ourselves in this terrible idea of where we can’t touch our friends, we can’t hug people, we can’t collaborate in person with people and we can’t go outside. And I think we need to be playful about, how can I turn this into a good idea? What are things that I could think differently to turn it into, you know what, this is the best thing that happened to me.
AD: So, I’m looking at this virus and this virus is a silent, invisible contagion, what if there were other silent, invisible contagious elements, but that were actually positive, that weren’t destructive?
AB: Ooh! You are a natural born designer [laughter].
AD: I mean it would ripple out and it would affect everyone and it could be something like your positive gossip.
AB: You know, I love how, and you just used the metaphor, by the way, which we could also talk about, which is one of my favorite tools, this invisible contagion. One of the invisible contagions that I’m finding and I’m perceiving is gratitude.
AD: Yes.
AB: Have you seen this incredible like infectious gratitude thing that’s going around?
AD: Yes.
AB: It’s incredible [laughter].
AD: My voice cracked at the grocery store when I told the cashier how much I appreciate him.
AB: Exactly!
AD: But the howling and the music and the clapping for the healthcare workers -
AB: Yeah, I mean that -
AD: Powerful.
AB: It’s powerful and it’s exactly like you said, it’s this other virus. And one of the masterminds of gratitude has become a dear friend of mine, Chester Elton, and he actually came to one of our virtual teas and talked about gratitude and one of the things he said is, I just want to share this with you here because I find it so useful. It’s so simple but it’s write a thank-you card to somebody you love and then take a picture of it and send it to them. He also said, sit down for two minutes and write down the names of everybody you’re grateful to and he also says at the end of the day, write two/three/four/five things that you’re grateful for.
And it’s a great way to kind of conclude your day and we actually developed a little twist on that with one of my collaborators Sarah Enes and then another dear friend of my [Todd Churches?] and said, let’s take that and ask people to do a drawing of what they’re grateful for. So we’re generating, not only gratitude in words, but gratitude in images. So everybody could give that a try. And when you’re drawing and when you’re thinking about gratitude, it really improves your mood.
AD: It does, it improves your mood and it improves your outlook because you start to hunt for the things that you’re grateful for and when you’re really inventorying all of that, those good things every day, it’s so much better than inventorying your fears, worries and anxieties.
AB: Since I have your great platform, I just want them to think about their situation from a different perspective. Basically think about it differently, and that is, imagine that your sheltering in place is actually you’re cocooning. So you’re like a caterpillar, but you’re now in your cocoon stage and when you come out of this cocoon, you’re going to be become a butterfly.
So, if you know about cocooning, you know that inside the cocoon is complete mush, it’s like soup. Everything, you know, breaks down and then you put it back together to emerge with your wings. For those of you who are inside the cocoon, this is a great opportunity to think about what are things that you are intentionally turning into a mush, in a way. What are the things that you want to get rid of and what are the things you want to keep.
Because the butterfly or inside the cocoon, the caterpillar keeps still some of the things that eventually become its wings and its antenna. And so even though everything we know has changed so fast, there’s things that we still want to keep. But there are also things that we want to get rid of and transform. So this is a good metaphor to think about that. And then think about, when you come out, what’s going to be your wings? What’s going to help you fly?
AD: I love that you use that metaphor and I want to take it even a little bit further because I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately too, just in terms of personal transformation. That time when it’s time to break open the chrysalis, and we’re gonna emerge now as different beings -
AB: Yes.
AD: We’ll have wings and we’ll have a different perspective because we’ll now see things from an aerial view as opposed to down at the ground level. That’s going to be weird and different too. How do we not get discouraged when we’re flapping our wings but, do you know what I’m saying?
AB: I know what -
AD: It might not be easy to be a young butterfly [laughs].
AB: Yes -
AD: How do we not lose hope when becoming a butterfly is hard and different and scary?
AB: You know, there’s a piece to that that you know, how are you going to protect yourself from everything else, right? I always fall back on my friends - Friends and collaboration. I mean look at us, just this collaboration that we’ve had over this podcast, right, building on each other’s ideas.
AD: Yeah. No, that’s exactly it, it’s friends - It’s true because especially if you keep your, while you’re in the soup phase of this [laughter], if your friends are also soup, then everyone will be young butterflies together.
AB: Yeah.
AD: And with that shared experience, that’s what we rely on. Oh I love you Ayse.
AB: I love you Amy, this was just, I had no idea that we were gonna land here, but I’ve really enjoyed myself.
AD: Thank you so much for sharing your heart. Thank you so much for sharing your heart and your story and your philosophy and your creative process with us so that we can use it in our own lives. You’re so generous and I’m so grateful for you.
AB: Thank you; you’ve been an amazing host and conversationalist. So thank you for creating this space for me to be playful and to be myself, my seven year old self.
AD: Yay!
This episode is presented as part of WantedDesign Manhattan Online Conversation Series, presented by Clever and Design Milk. Visit wanteddesignnyc.com/online to view the schedule and register for live talks.
Add yourself to Ayse’s mailing list to get more details about her regular community “tea” conversations here. Buy a copy of her book, Design the Life You Love here.
Many thanks to this episode’s partner:
Polish Cultural Institute New York - to learn more about Tomek Rygalik, the Circula project and Eco-Solidarity platform head to circula.org and polishculture-nyc.org.
Ayse and her family
Work for Herman Miller
Work for Herman Miller
Work for Toto
Clever is produced by 2VDE Media. Thanks to Rich Stroffolino for editing this episode.
Music in this episode courtesy of El Ten Eleven—hear more on Bandcamp.
Shoutout to Jenny Rask for designing the Clever logo.
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