About
Ayse
Birsel
Designer. Author. Speaker. Coach.
Introduction
Named a Fast Company Most Creative Person in Business and a Thinkers50 Radar thinker, with work in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, Ayse (pronounced Eye-Shay) Birsel is the author of Design the Life You Love and Design the Long Life You Love. She is the co-founder of Birsel + Seck, an award-winning design studio. For thirty years, the world’s top leaders and companies — including Amazon, Herman Miller, and Toyota — have turned to her to design what’s next.
Pronounced Eye-Shay.
Biography
Ayse Birsel is one of the world’s leading industrial designers, an executive coach, and an author. She works with executives at the top of their game — leaders who have landed their dream job and now want to design their role, their time, and the legacy they want to leave.
Named one of Fast Company’s Most Creative People in Business, one of the Marshall Goldsmith 100 Coaches, and included in Thinkers50’s Radar List of management thinkers most likely to shape the future of organizations, Ayse teaches executives, entrepreneurs, and teams to think like designers.
Her method is Deconstruction:Reconstruction™. Taking the whole apart, seeing the same things differently, and putting it back together in a whole new way. Her process grows directly out of thirty years of designing products and consulting to Fortune 500 companies, including Amazon, CVS, Herman Miller, Target, and Toyota.
Her Madame Dakar sofa for Moroso was named one of The 25 Most Defining Pieces of Furniture From the Last 100 Years by The New York Times in 2024. Her work is in the permanent collections of MoMA, the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, and the Philadelphia Art Museum.
A Fulbright Scholar and founding faculty at the School of Visual Arts, Ayse holds a master’s degree in Industrial Design from Pratt Institute. Born in Turkey, she is a New Yorker who now calls Paris home.
Her job is to solve problems and make people’s lives better — through products, or through the process of design itself.
Why I love what I do
In her words
"You’ve probably sat in one of my office systems for Herman Miller; peeled potatoes with my peeler for Target; or used my toilet for TOTO. Designing products with leading brands taught me how effective design principles are in solving complex problems. I have applied these principles to life to help thousands of people of all ages and backgrounds transform their lives."
Awards &
collections
- Fast Company
- Most Creative People in Business
- Thinkers50
- Radar List
- MoMA
- Permanent collection
- Cooper Hewitt
- Permanent collection
- Philadelphia Museum of Art
- Permanent collection
- The New York Times
- 25 Most Defining Pieces of Furniture, 2024
- IDEA Gold · NeoCon Gold · ID Magazine Gold
- Product design awards
- Marshall Goldsmith 100 Coaches
- Member
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