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Designer
Ayse Birsel
Ayse Birsel (pronounced Eye-Shay) is an industrial designer, author, speaker and coach, and co-founder of the design studio Birsel + Seck. She was born in Turkey, earned her master's in Industrial Design at Pratt Institute, and is a…
Biography
Background
Ayse Birsel (pronounced Eye-Shay) is an industrial designer, author, speaker and coach, and co-founder of the design studio Birsel + Seck. She was born in Turkey, earned her master's in Industrial Design at Pratt Institute, and is a Fulbright Scholar and founding faculty member of the School of Visual Arts. She is a New Yorker who now calls Paris home.
Signature Style
Her method is Deconstruction:Reconstruction, which takes the whole apart, sees the same things differently and puts it back together in a new way. The process grew out of thirty years of designing products and working with Fortune 500 companies including Amazon, CVS, Herman Miller, Target and Toyota. She and Bibi Seck use it to co-design with clients, to break preconceptions, shift the point of view and solve to create new value within existing constraints.
Notable Works
Her portfolio runs to hundreds of products across toilet seats, office systems and concept cars, made for Herman Miller, Knoll, Target and Toyota among others. Her Madame Dakar sofa for Moroso was named one of the 25 Most Defining Pieces of Furniture of the Last 100 Years by The New York Times in 2024. Teneo Storage Furniture for Herman Miller received an IDEA Gold award in the Office and Productivity category in 2009 and a Best of NeoCon Gold in Filing and Storage in 2008.
Legacy
MoMA, the Cooper Hewitt and the Philadelphia Museum of Art each hold her work in their permanent collections. She is the author of Design the Life You Love and Design the Long Life You Love, and Fast Company named her one of its Most Creative People in Business.
