a transdisciplinary innovation platform, powered by its two parts: creative hub and strategic design studio.
ATÖLYE is an transdisciplinary innovation platform. Situated at the core of our practice, our strategic design studio consists of 30 strategists and designers geared towards tackling innovation on multiple scales. With a clear intent on transdisciplinarity, we love addressing wicked problems that deal with conflicting paradigms, stakeholder complexity and emergent processes.
Role: Founding Member, Research Team Lead, Multimedia Team Lead
Year: 2013 - 2017
We created ATOLYE as a platform that combines strategy with design at three different levels: organizations, product-service-systems and platforms. ATOLYE first engages with organizations at a strategic level, discovering challenges, mapping opportunities and envisioning a jointly desirable future. Then the platform guides them through their organizational transformation journey, or develop new product service systems.
ATOLYE is fluent with scales and enjoy working across digital, product or architectural design, all of which form holistic human experiences.
For all projects, we envisioned ATOLYE to take great care in diligent impact assessment to become a learning organization. ATOLYE also emphasizes strategic communications to contribute to a learning society.
Nestled in Istanbul, ATOLYE is nourished by the dynamic, if not chaotic, nature of the city, while developing projects at a fast pace and with an adaptive attitude. We saw the inherent impatience that surrounds us as an advantage for “getting things done,” whereas an ambitious talent pool would help us take on projects of global scale. ATOLYE is connected to the world via different creative hub and entrepreneurship networks, with whom it jointly develops projects, participate in exchange programs and focus on being a “global” organization in all senses of the word.
The studio is surrounded by three components of a creative hub: community, event venue and prototyping lab. ATOLYE community of 150 individuals and organizations is rigorously curated with clear criteria pertaining to diversity and interaction level and is housed under the same roof. This community serves as a backbone for executing projects, catalyzing co-learning through feedback sessions, and enabling serendipitous new collaborations
The Prototyping Lab, as part of the global MIT Fab Lab network, fuels a culture of prototyping with a diverse set of tools and workshops. The lab helps the team to reach out to young and restless minds with residency programs. The venue allows immersive co-design processes with clients and external stakeholders. It also serves a public-facing front and a channel for critical content creation around design, technology and entrepreneurship.
Aside from creating its own events content focusing on design, technology and entrepreneurship, ATOLYE provides curational support to the corporate organizations it works with.
Combining these strengths, ATOLYE developed a business model that brings together the public and private sectors and the academia, through investments received from Turkey and abroad, funding support from Istanbul Development Agency and the partnership with Ozyegin University. ATOLYE projects have been funded on Kickstarter, won global design awards, raised and distributed the largest-to-date social investment grant in Turkey. ATOLYE has also been acknowledged by Stanford d.school as their most influential spinoff for 2014.