skip to Main Content
Seda Evis

Designer in Residence: Seda Evis

Designer in Residence: Seda Evis

Designer in Residence: Seda Evis

While Seda Evis participates as a Designer-in-Residence at UC San Diego with The Design Lab, and is VP of Strategy & Growth at FreshForm Interactive—an experience design and innovation consultancy—she also claims to have what she refers to as a superpower: her hybrid mind. 

Evis describes her mind as the combination of two worlds: the business side and the design side. She explains that business typically only laser-focuses on one solution, while design calls for “ambiguity exploration.” She explains that it involves “looking for divergence instead of convergence; and multiple solutions instead of just one; or finding that there isn’t one right answer.”

Evis credits the origin of her hybrid mind to being raised in a geographically, ethnically and culturally diverse part of the world.  “I grew up in Turkey, which strides between West and East. You’ll have all these dichotomies that you need to resolve, to live with, and to make sense of things. So I think I have that just naturally. ”

Evis attended the Middle East Technical University in Turkey,  where she earned her bachelors in City and Regional Planning–a set of expertise that still comes in handy in her work today. “I don’t plan cities in my current profession, but [I] definitely [use] the skills of working with diverse people from diverse industries or professions.” She explains that as an undergrad, “we did tons of group work, always looking at the larger context, but also zoomed into the neighborhood and street level experience of the city, so I tend to do that in my profession now  when looking at the problem I’m solving.” 

When it came time for graduate school, Evis made the leap from Turkey to the United Statesto study at the University of San Diego. While earning her MBA in Finance, Supply Chain Management, Seda recalls that the marketing component of her MBA was where she noticed the culture shock of moving to the United States. “You know Asia as: we’re very good at math and physics and those kinds of things. But we’re not very good at selling them; selling ideas or coming up with ideas,” she explains, “Marketing was very difficult for me. I would breeze through statistics, math, economics, and finance, all of that stuff, but marketing, where you really conceptualize an idea,–and not only that, but you communicate that idea–that was very difficult for me, and I think Americans excel at that.” 

Evis has made her mark in human-centered design, having successfully completed projects for global companies, including Facebook, CVS Health, GE, Nissan, Toyota and Amazon. She says she measures success in two ways. “I look at the product design or service design world, and one way to look at your success is to look at how many products or services come to life,” she explains. “Another way to look at it, I think, is the amount of ideas that you generated and then impacted the number of people without necessarily a product or service, but you helped change or start changing the culture around something important for humanity, like aging, work and purpose, health, human rights, racism..etc,..”

Given everything she has experienced, it is difficult for Evis to pinpoint which project has been her crowning achievement so far. One that she is most proud of, however, is a two-year long research and design project where she traveled around the United States and talked to people over the age of 65. “[We] really tried to understand what aging is like in the United States and really change our perspective about these old ideas about aging,” she said. “It was both a design and research project, but also very much a culture change project…[We] met hundreds of people and really learned about life and I think the best design projects are when you not only learn intellectually about your work, but also it affects how you live and evolves your own values.” The end result of the project was a Co-Design kit authored by Evis and the team at Birsel & Seck Design Studio and the start of Alive Venture Studio “to help entrepreneurs effect change or market products and services for this segment.” 

As a Designer-in-Residence at The Design Lab,  Evis enjoys working in an interdisciplinary setting, which she says enhances her existing skillset. “Academia tends to be quite separate from how the practice is done,” she explains. “I find ways of doing interdisciplinary work, as well as cross industry work, very important for innovation because that’s how you actually get seeds from different places.” As of now, most of Evis’s work at The Design Lab has been working with the Community Team on the now winning bid for the World Design Capital 2024 (WDC) designation. Her work dovetails with her role on the Board of  Directors for the Design Forward Alliance–a non-profit organization started by the Lab in partnership with the regional design community and one of the partners co-leading the HOME 2024 WDC efforts alongside the Design Lab, Burnham Center for Community Advancement, the City of San Diego and the City of Tijuana.   The designation puts the San Diego-Tijuana region in a prestigious international cohort recognized for the “effective use of design to drive economic, social, cultural and environmental development.”  Even the proposal theme is significant, Evis says. “Home” not only refers to the immense and diverse communities of San Diego and Tijuana that form one, but also serves as an acronym for Human-centered, Open, Multi-disciplinary/Multi-cultural, and Experimental. For Evis, participating in HOME2024 signifies her career “coming full circle.” 

While Seda Evis participates as a Designer-in-Residence at UC San Diego with The Design Lab, and is VP of Strategy & Growth at FreshForm Interactive—an experience design and innovation consultancy—she also claims to have what she refers to as a superpower: her hybrid mind. 

Evis describes her mind as the combination of two worlds: the business side and the design side. She explains that business typically only laser-focuses on one solution, while design calls for “ambiguity exploration.” She explains that it involves “looking for divergence instead of convergence; and multiple solutions instead of just one; or finding that there isn’t one right answer.”

Evis credits the origin of her hybrid mind to being raised in a geographically, ethnically and culturally diverse part of the world.  “I grew up in Turkey, which strides between West and East. You’ll have all these dichotomies that you need to resolve, to live with, and to make sense of things. So I think I have that just naturally. ”

Evis attended the Middle East Technical University in Turkey,  where she earned her bachelors in City and Regional Planning–a set of expertise that still comes in handy in her work today. “I don’t plan cities in my current profession, but [I] definitely [use] the skills of working with diverse people from diverse industries or professions.” She explains that as an undergrad, “we did tons of group work, always looking at the larger context, but also zoomed into the neighborhood and street level experience of the city, so I tend to do that in my profession now  when looking at the problem I’m solving.” 

When it came time for graduate school, Evis made the leap from Turkey to the United Statesto study at the University of San Diego. While earning her MBA in Finance, Supply Chain Management, Seda recalls that the marketing component of her MBA was where she noticed the culture shock of moving to the United States. “You know Asia as: we’re very good at math and physics and those kinds of things. But we’re not very good at selling them; selling ideas or coming up with ideas,” she explains, “Marketing was very difficult for me. I would breeze through statistics, math, economics, and finance, all of that stuff, but marketing, where you really conceptualize an idea,–and not only that, but you communicate that idea–that was very difficult for me, and I think Americans excel at that.” 

Evis has made her mark in human-centered design, having successfully completed projects for global companies, including Facebook, CVS Health, GE, Nissan, Toyota and Amazon. She says she measures success in two ways. “I look at the product design or service design world, and one way to look at your success is to look at how many products or services come to life,” she explains. “Another way to look at it, I think, is the amount of ideas that you generated and then impacted the number of people without necessarily a product or service, but you helped change or start changing the culture around something important for humanity, like aging, work and purpose, health, human rights, racism..etc,..”

Given everything she has experienced, it is difficult for Evis to pinpoint which project has been her crowning achievement so far. One that she is most proud of, however, is a two-year long research and design project where she traveled around the United States and talked to people over the age of 65. “[We] really tried to understand what aging is like in the United States and really change our perspective about these old ideas about aging,” she said. “It was both a design and research project, but also very much a culture change project…[We] met hundreds of people and really learned about life and I think the best design projects are when you not only learn intellectually about your work, but also it affects how you live and evolves your own values.” The end result of the project was a Co-Design kit authored by Evis and the team at Birsel & Seck Design Studio and the start of Alive Venture Studio “to help entrepreneurs effect change or market products and services for this segment.” 

As a Designer-in-Residence at The Design Lab,  Evis enjoys working in an interdisciplinary setting, which she says enhances her existing skillset. “Academia tends to be quite separate from how the practice is done,” she explains. “I find ways of doing interdisciplinary work, as well as cross industry work, very important for innovation because that’s how you actually get seeds from different places.” As of now, most of Evis’s work at The Design Lab has been working with the Community Team on the now winning bid for the World Design Capital 2024 (WDC) designation. Her work dovetails with her role on the Board of  Directors for the Design Forward Alliance–a non-profit organization started by the Lab in partnership with the regional design community and one of the partners co-leading the HOME 2024 WDC efforts alongside the Design Lab, Burnham Center for Community Advancement, the City of San Diego and the City of Tijuana.   The designation puts the San Diego-Tijuana region in a prestigious international cohort recognized for the “effective use of design to drive economic, social, cultural and environmental development.”  Even the proposal theme is significant, Evis says. “Home” not only refers to the immense and diverse communities of San Diego and Tijuana that form one, but also serves as an acronym for Human-centered, Open, Multi-disciplinary/Multi-cultural, and Experimental. For Evis, participating in HOME2024 signifies her career “coming full circle.” 

While Seda Evis participates as a Designer-in-Residence at UC San Diego with The Design Lab, and is VP of Strategy & Growth at FreshForm Interactive—an experience design and innovation consultancy—she also claims to have what she refers to as a superpower: her hybrid mind. 

Evis describes her mind as the combination of two worlds: the business side and the design side. She explains that business typically only laser-focuses on one solution, while design calls for “ambiguity exploration.” She explains that it involves “looking for divergence instead of convergence; and multiple solutions instead of just one; or finding that there isn’t one right answer.”

Evis credits the origin of her hybrid mind to being raised in a geographically, ethnically and culturally diverse part of the world.  “I grew up in Turkey, which strides between West and East. You’ll have all these dichotomies that you need to resolve, to live with, and to make sense of things. So I think I have that just naturally. ”

Evis attended the Middle East Technical University in Turkey,  where she earned her bachelors in City and Regional Planning–a set of expertise that still comes in handy in her work today. “I don’t plan cities in my current profession, but [I] definitely [use] the skills of working with diverse people from diverse industries or professions.” She explains that as an undergrad, “we did tons of group work, always looking at the larger context, but also zoomed into the neighborhood and street level experience of the city, so I tend to do that in my profession now  when looking at the problem I’m solving.” 

When it came time for graduate school, Evis made the leap from Turkey to the United Statesto study at the University of San Diego. While earning her MBA in Finance, Supply Chain Management, Seda recalls that the marketing component of her MBA was where she noticed the culture shock of moving to the United States. “You know Asia as: we’re very good at math and physics and those kinds of things. But we’re not very good at selling them; selling ideas or coming up with ideas,” she explains, “Marketing was very difficult for me. I would breeze through statistics, math, economics, and finance, all of that stuff, but marketing, where you really conceptualize an idea,–and not only that, but you communicate that idea–that was very difficult for me, and I think Americans excel at that.” 

Evis has made her mark in human-centered design, having successfully completed projects for global companies, including Facebook, CVS Health, GE, Nissan, Toyota and Amazon. She says she measures success in two ways. “I look at the product design or service design world, and one way to look at your success is to look at how many products or services come to life,” she explains. “Another way to look at it, I think, is the amount of ideas that you generated and then impacted the number of people without necessarily a product or service, but you helped change or start changing the culture around something important for humanity, like aging, work and purpose, health, human rights, racism..etc,..”

Given everything she has experienced, it is difficult for Evis to pinpoint which project has been her crowning achievement so far. One that she is most proud of, however, is a two-year long research and design project where she traveled around the United States and talked to people over the age of 65. “[We] really tried to understand what aging is like in the United States and really change our perspective about these old ideas about aging,” she said. “It was both a design and research project, but also very much a culture change project…[We] met hundreds of people and really learned about life and I think the best design projects are when you not only learn intellectually about your work, but also it affects how you live and evolves your own values.” The end result of the project was a Co-Design kit authored by Evis and the team at Birsel & Seck Design Studio and the start of Alive Venture Studio “to help entrepreneurs effect change or market products and services for this segment.” 

As a Designer-in-Residence at The Design Lab,  Evis enjoys working in an interdisciplinary setting, which she says enhances her existing skillset. “Academia tends to be quite separate from how the practice is done,” she explains. “I find ways of doing interdisciplinary work, as well as cross industry work, very important for innovation because that’s how you actually get seeds from different places.” As of now, most of Evis’s work at The Design Lab has been working with the Community Team on the now winning bid for the World Design Capital 2024 (WDC) designation. Her work dovetails with her role on the Board of  Directors for the Design Forward Alliance–a non-profit organization started by the Lab in partnership with the regional design community and one of the partners co-leading the HOME 2024 WDC efforts alongside the Design Lab, Burnham Center for Community Advancement, the City of San Diego and the City of Tijuana.   The designation puts the San Diego-Tijuana region in a prestigious international cohort recognized for the “effective use of design to drive economic, social, cultural and environmental development.”  Even the proposal theme is significant, Evis says. “Home” not only refers to the immense and diverse communities of San Diego and Tijuana that form one, but also serves as an acronym for Human-centered, Open, Multi-disciplinary/Multi-cultural, and Experimental. For Evis, participating in HOME2024 signifies her career “coming full circle.” 

Read Next

The UC San Diego Design Lab

This is an exciting time for the field of design. The technologies that the research communities have worked on for the past 25 years have leapt off the pages of academic journals and into the daily lives of billions. What used to be our imagination is now our reality. These have enabled an extremely wide range of innovation in multiple arenas: healthcare and medicine, business, social interaction, entertainment.

But technology only enables: a practical application requires more than the underlying technology. If we build things for people, then knowledge of both people and technology is required. If we are to make them pleasurable, then the creativity and craft skills of artists and traditionally trained industrial and graphic designers are required. If they are to be understandable, then social scientists are required, including experts in writing and exposition. If they are to thrive in the world of business, then schools of management are required. Design aspires to combine these very different vertical threads of knowledge. Design is an all encompassing field that integrates together business and engineering, the social sciences and the arts.
FCC Connect2Health L.A.U.N.C.H.

FCC’s Connect2Health Task Force has released the L.A.U.N.C.H. Senior Leadership Think Tank

Design Lab participants: Faculty member Eliah Aronoff-Spencer and Post-Doc Melanie McComsey

The Federal Communications Commission's Connect2Health Task Force and the National Cancer Institute (NCI) of the National Institutes of Health convened a groundbreaking meeting at FCC headquarters in Washington, DC, with senior thought leaders from both the public and private sectors and across the country. The broad expertise included representatives from government, academia, industry, healthcare systems, public health, biotechnology, design and innovation, and telecommunications. The day-long meeting was designed to usher in the next phase of the L.A.U.N.C.H. initiative by gathering information and individual expert input related to the initiative's efforts to date.
Surveillance Technology San Diego

San Diego council committee unanimously approves ordinances targeting surveillance technology

Photo courtesy of John Gibbins/The San Diego Union-Tribune

A City Council committee on Wednesday unanimously approved two proposed ordinances geared at governing surveillance technologies in the city, an action sparked by sustained pushback from activists and others who were surprised and upset last year when it was revealed that San Diego had quietly installed cameras on streetlights throughout the city.

Lilly Irani, an associate professor at UC San Diego (and Design Lab faculty) who specializes in the ethics of technology, called the vote “a win for better governance in the long term.”

Irani helped draft the ordinances and assisted the organized opposition dubbed the TRUST San Diego coalition, which focuses on responsible surveillance in the region. The coalition was born out of concerns about one specific technology — so-called smart streetlights — and ultimately landed a seat at the table to draft the proposals.

“Without Councilmember Monica Montgomery championing this... there would be no table,” Irani said.
Benjamin Bergen

Design Lab member Benjamin Bergen featured as an expert in “History of Swear Words”

Picture Credit: Netflix

Design Lab member and UC San Diego Cognitive Science professor Benjamin Bergen was featured as an expert in "History of Swear Words," a new Netflix comedy series exploring the usage of and science behind cursing. Bergen is the author of "What the F: What Swearing Reveals About Our Language, Our Brains, and Ourselves" and "Louder Than Words: The New Science of How the Mind Makes Meaning"

Watch the full series now on Netflix!
Don Norman Interview Design Usability

“I Think We Have to Start Over”: Usability Guru Don Norman on the Next Internet

"I think we have to start over. And we may need very separate networks. The notion that there is one network that is for everything maybe is wrong. We used to have separate networks. They were, in fact, determined by the technology. Hence radio was different than telephones, which was different than television, which was different than printed books. And today we say, “Nah, it’s all information,” and that this isn’t that neat, because on the internet you can do all of that. Well, OK. But the content is really what’s important, not the technology or the way it’s distributed. And I would love to find a different scheme where people are controlling their own data." - Don Norman
Ucsd Extension Design Bootcamp

Design Lab and UCSD Extension Team Up for Design Bootcamp

This past July, San Diego high school students embarked on a five-day dive into anthropology and design as part of Design Bootcamp, a collaboration between the UC San Diego Design Lab and UC San Diego Extension.

The class first emerged from the demand for design workshops in San Diego coupled with UC San Diego’s interest in offering classes to pre-collegiate students. “This first Research Scholars ‘Design Bootcamp,’ if you will, is our first prototype,” says Michele Morris, Design Lab Associate Director. “The needs of the University, the expertise of the Design Lab, and the community platforms of UC San Diego’s Extension all came together seamlessly.”

Mayya Azarova, a Design Lab Anthropology PhD candidate, joined the team as the Bootcamp’s inaugural instructor.  Coupling her background in anthropology with design, the team customized an offering focused around ethnography and empathy-building.
Back To Top