Social Innovator in Residence: Engin Ayaz

[Music] Welcome to the Design Thinking Round Table. I'm Ann or Fired and ethnographer studying social innovation. In this series, Social Innovators in Residence, I converse with passionate and inspiring social innovators who are visiting us at the Erad Chair in Social Innovation and the Desis Lab at NOVA SB. [Music] Today I'm delighted to be in conversation with Angin Ayas, a transdisciplinary designer and strategist with a background in architecture, system thinking, and interaction design. Angin is a co-founder of Atelier, a strategic design and innovation consultancy focusing on community-powered change. His work has been exhibited worldwide and received awards from course of '77, World Architecture Community and Good Magazine among authors. Welcome, Angin. Hello, great to be here. So I wanted to get started. Maybe we're just your personal journey, but led you from architecture and engineering to interaction design and becoming, you know, a transdisciplinary researcher and strategist. And what's the story that took you where you are today as a co-founder of Atelier? Great, thank you. I mean, I think all those words are kind of a rapper around being a curious generalist. I feel like I've had this inclination to immerse myself in a new field, spend a few years in it, really explore the edges. And that would lead me to another territory, which I would then explore. And I guess the beauty of these relatively broad terms, like strategist or designers that gives you the permission to move across these territories. I think that curiosity always had the underpinnings of what connects us as human beings to each other, what connects us to other contexts and what connects us to ourselves. And I've realized architecture is a good backdrop for this. You know, it's architecture that shapes a lot of our behaviors in its implicit ways. So I've been always fascinated by that. If you look at the office plan of an organization, you can read so much about its culture. If you look at where people convene and gather for entertainment or a connection that tells so much about society. So that has been, I think, a good foundation. But then I realize it's also false shorts, occasionally, to shape behaviors in more minute ways. And I've done, realized, especially in the context of how we relate and connect to climate crisis, which is incredibly abstract in its scale and its time horizon. It doesn't necessarily help you change behavior to just build high-performing buildings, which I've done for a while in a large consultancy on net zero buildings, ecological cities, and new types of neighborhoods. We were thinking a lot with technology and how technology can be integrated, but not necessarily to the rubric of daily behavior, which took me to interaction design as a field. Because then you're immersing yourself in much more specific ways of, you know, what is the digital interface in front of you? What is the one thing it's saying? What is the behavioral bias that is in there or the nudge? So that exploration helped me realize, OK, we have actually experiences that weave between the digital and the physical territories. And then I was like, oh, there is a whole thing called experience strategy and design, service design as a field. So it's been just weaving myself in these different areas and equipping myself with different tools and frameworks without getting, I guess, married to any of them too much. And eventually I found, OK, there's actually a whole discipline called systems thinking and systems design that even helps you zoom out wider. So technically, as a generalist, I would be borderline unemployable with this bandwidth of different practices. So I'm grateful that Attelia allows me to move across them. I think it's also very interesting as we see all the fragmentation of professions and skills and expertise to realize that we also need people who are able to kind of navigate across these boundaries and these skills. So I think we met in-- I was trying to go back in time in 2013. And you were finishing your thesis for your master at NYU ITP in interactive design. And you were finishing, you were going to defend, and then you told me like you were moving to Istanbul, and you were co-funding atelier. And so I've been following the story of Atelier. And it kind of reflects maybe in some ways a lot of your personal fluctuation from being atelier, meaning Turkish workshop, which is also very close to the French word. But also when from a makerspace, which was something that I was trying to create also, to being now more of a consultancy, but still with this kind of focus on collaboration, creativity, and interaction. So if you could tell me a little bit more, because I missed some of the points of the stories. Yeah, absolutely. So I guess I was always fascinated with-- I guess what one does as work, as well as the environment, or the scene that allows you to do that work. As I was in ITP, I felt like the de facto path would be that as someone that is dabbling in the world of climate change, sustainability, behavioral design, I would be working on digital or physical artifacts, installations, or experiences that kind of build awareness, not for behavior change. That was fascinated by that problem, by that challenge, which I still think to this day at 10, 15 years down the road. We're not necessarily in a place as a species where we really have shifted in meaningful ways. So it's fascinating to watch that what will make us shift and what won. But I also realized talking actually to Red Burns, the founder of ITP, before she passed away, that was maybe in my first year, where she was sharing some of the principles that ITP was founded upon, and how she created this environment, this scene that you kind of almost take for granted, but it's extremely rare and special. And she said, the one is about curating the right people, that somehow ITP independent of people's background, which is incredibly diverse, maybe within the 200, they would be at least 40 or 50 disciplines, professional disciplines where people come from, that there was somehow a shared language that was forged, and that shared language came from, I think, that others are incredibly curious. They're very generous. They do not show up with, I would say, the big egos that get in the way, and that also then allow for mutual collaboration to unfold. Then she said the second piece that built ITP is, the way that it becomes an environment where you just want to spend time in. It's not just a place where you come, do your work and move on. It's a place where you are connecting with people on all sorts of levels, and you're basically weaving the relationships, and that studio floor was basically the day and the night of your life. And only then she said beautiful work comes, that is truly interdisciplinary, or back then, through my thesis I encountered the work transdisciplinary, which I was fascinated by, because I think it's even more of letting go of stuff that's needed to operate in that place, where it doesn't matter, you know, whether you have studied something, if the situation calls up for a certain mindset or a certain skill set, you have the confidence to learn or to work with people around it. So that environment made me think, okay, the parameters that set out this environment are actually relatively straightforward. Pick the right people, curate on the right principles and the right values, allow for a lot of wild cards and interdisciplinarity, let people spend a lot of time together without a transactional basis of relationships, and then watch stuff unfold. So with another friend of mine who was in business school at Stanford at the time, you know, he initially actually brought up the idea as I was in this path of what is my own practice, you know, my own creative practice. Well, why don't we bring something like a tech shop, which was very popular back then as a maker space to Turkey? And then we dabbled with it and I was like, well, why don't we create our own endemic thing? It's a different context and yes, the idea of a maker space is beautiful and fascinating and it didn't exist at all at the time so we felt like we could leapfrog it. by bringing it from US, where we both were at the time after 10 years to Istanbul, where we had grown up. And I think the lucky part was that we could take this risk with some seed funding that we could get from these angel investors who saw the social value of this idea. None of us were exactly clear on the commercial value of this idea. And the idea was, as you may remember, in my thesis, can we bring curious, motivated, proactive people? Can we curate for them? Can we engage them? And can we activate them through amazing projects? A lot of creative spaces back then. And even now, we're either social hangout zones, loosely networked people that come out, could together for happy hours, et cetera. They didn't have this level of fluidity that also combined like a genuine impact lens. So I think we tapped on the right nerve somehow. We went back to Istanbul with the backing that we had from some of these investors. We could take a bit of risk, which meant like we didn't have to figure out the business model in day one. And it was a two-year, very hands-on, multiple conversations a day, many workshops, many events later, realizing, OK, there were these incredibly talented individual practitioners in strategy and all sorts of design and innovation. And we united them under a shared narrative. Without expecting much in return, it was actually Timor Reilly who shared that quote with me in during the thesis, which literally wrote, in the first steps, as you've walked up to Corridor of Atelier, it said, create more value than you capture. And we were like, OK, let's just stick to this mantra. Let's just keep creating this spirit of generosity, of connecting people, of playing the long game. And that then eventually made us realize, first, the maker space and the fab lab wasn't a business model. We couldn't make it work. We, I think, built interesting momentum with the tools we were dabbling with and the workshops we've done. But they were what I would call social objects. Through the three printing workshop, we happened to do the first one in Turkey to the extent that I know. We connected people. They learned to tool together. They failed together. They built their small things together. But it's the relationship that counted. And with that mindset, we realized we just keep building what we call social objects. And that worked across scales. A university came and said, we love the space you've designed. Why don't you also design an innovation lab for us? And that's a different scale. But that innovation lab, the architectural layout of these containers and the courtyard, was just so that people felt, OK, there's a new space that I couldn't belong to in this large campus. These were biotech researchers. There's a courtyard that we can convene in. And there's an identity that we're part of, which we named, a specific name in that context. And then we did Kickstarter projects with small assuals, for instance, that offset the carbon of the shoe, a nifty project, or it didn't scale. But that led us to thinking about the modality of a product, modality of an architectural space we would do innovation workshops for leading teams on large corporate settings. But ultimately, I think we were just after connection. It's like, who is my tribe? Who are people like me, where I can be vulnerable, where I can build together, where I can learn from one another? And that kind of sets you up for this perpetual school context that I think maybe deep down, neither of us, me and my partner, ever wanted to be done with the school bit. And we were just constantly trying to recreate it. And yeah, it's been 11 years journey with a ton of pivots. But I think what doesn't change is some of these principles on collaboration, on long-termism, and on just curiosity at the core. So, after all these pivots, how would you describe what Atelier is today? It took us a few years to kind of see the red thread that connects our work, because we were, as I said, we were basically organizing ourselves under what we call for offerings or practices. One was architectural work, and we did a lot of spaces for educational institutional schools, university skindergarten, as well as offices, innovation labs. And that has its own canon, that has its own discipline, right? It's not very common that that same entity, also does capability building in organizations on facilitation, design thinking, and systems thinking. And another, that was Atelier's Academy, that has been, another line of work has been Atelier's Experience Lab. So, we would do digital apps for banks at scale, or we would do interfaces. We would do exhibits and experiences in different settings. But over the years, we realized they're all in service of something. They're all in service of cultivating communities. So, we would actually look at any work with the bias of who are your stakeholders, how can we weave them together, be it through the space we design, be it through the app we do, or be it through the learning cohorts. So, in the meantime, as we were doing these projects, we were always managing and cultivating our own community. In Atelier, in Turkey, in Istanbul, we kept that 150 people and for five years, we were kind of gardening this. We had community management as a constant practice, and we would take a lot of learnings from this. Then, when we also branched out to Dubai to build a hub there in partnership with Dubai Future Foundation over the last five years, a lot of our work shifted to Middle East and some in Europe. And we would kind of do this community as a backdrop. Who are the members? How are we working with them as freelancers? How are we creating many to many learning models? How do we host a lot of events? And ultimately, we realized we were also actually cultivating communities for our clients. Because sometimes, they would come and say, "Actually, I do want to build a whole new innovation district that came in Abu Dhabi." And if we didn't add this district, we want to build a hub of 4,000 square meters. Where do we start? Yes, we did the architectural strategy of it. Yes, we did the experience strategy of it. And even a bit of the business model, because we also built our own venture, so we had that capability. But more importantly, ultimately, we were like, "What is the community here? Who is it going to be? Who are the founding members? How do you curate them? How do you engage them? How do you incentivize them?" So the community became our offering itself, which we now call community lab. So as a leader now, when they're interfacing with Atelier, as we work with public or private sector or NGO leaders, we are already filtering for the type of leader that already believes in the power of communities, in the potential of building ecosystems and networks. When they do, then we say, "Okay, how do you want us to start?" We can start with your assets. Maybe you've built an innovation lab that is dormant and not really working. Let's do an impact assessment and then turn it around, run it differently. Or they might say, "Well, you know, this is a real case. We want to build a new museum for steam, education for children. And we want to completely change this at a nationwide scale." So we're like, "How can we build a digital community and pop up activations so that when your museum is open in two years, you have your stakeholders and you have listened to them, you have built with them." So while someone can describe this as, "Okay, that's kind of an events activation strategy or a learning strategy." Ultimately, we see it as, "Who are the core practitioners? What we call communities of practice around your entity, around your brand, around your organization?" So that's what we keep going back on and that's where we see a lot of power. And if that works, we have seen, you can basically make your organization more community-powered. And there are very specific ways to measure that. For instance, if you have a strong innovation ecosystem around you, you can measure how many new ideas are being born out of this ecosystem that you're overseeing. How many of them get further funding? How many of them scale? You can also look at talent attraction and retention from that lens because if your entity has built a broad community around itself, we've been talking to a bank in Netherlands, for instance, about in the field of agriculture, how they can build this discourse around regenerative agriculture. So that is, what is that? That is farmers out on the field, that is policymakers, that is startups and technology providers. How are you managing this ecosystem? Can also mean you find the best talent that moves to your organization, as your core team, or you find the best talent in your organization that is willing to go above and beyond and manage this stakeholder network. So another whole story sits with brand because we built image, for instance, which is for Turkey's first social impact in innovation platform. Back seven, eight years ago, UNDP has been a far partner. We built a lot of programs around sustainable development goals. We pulled in Stanford Social Innovation Review, brought them in to Turkey as part of this platform. And the co-founding partner, Zorlu, is one of the large Congolamrits in Turkey. By the virtue of creating this new platform, standalone, not as a sub-department under them, but a new entity, now they have seen a very sizable optic in their public perception. Because now their brand speaks through this new platform, this language of we believe in a future of social innovation. We believe in activating youth. We believe in activating the investor ecosystem around social enterprise. If they did thousands of ads, they wouldn't be able to get to this level of public perception in as much as having built a standalone platform. And now the platform works with many entities across Turkey. It has its own team. Zorlu sits in the board. We also sit in the board, but it's its own organism. And the power of communities and platforms is if you get it right, it takes three, five years at least to get it right. But if you do, it's kind of discarding that keeps giving. Now Zorlu doesn't have to invest a lot of energy and new funding, which if they just did a CSR project, they would probably have to infuse funding every single step of the way. So it's a bit of a different paradigm that we see with shaping these communities and platforms. It takes a lot of specific skills to get it right. You have to understand org design. You have to understand behavioral science, digital and physical experience design, strategy, branding. So we see it as a beautiful combination of interdisciplinary systems work, you know, the how to build communities. Yeah, I think it's also interesting because it's like moving out of designing. And I think you talk about designing social objects, but it's really this idea that you become the curator and or orchestrator of a social object. Let's call it like this. It can be a platform. It can be a space. And then you also have to be humble enough to get out of it at some point and trust. So you trigger and then you cultivate and you have to also let the community then take over. And I think that sometimes also something that is also a paradigm shift. So do you feel like it because you've been in many fields in design and like talking with with a lot of designer who kind of move to becoming more facilitator and more into a system thinking type of approach. It is a different way and that maybe you evolve or you see an evolution in the field of and I think it's not only in designing in fact, but it's like asking us to move away of our way of thinking of ourselves as experts at own knowledge and becoming more into a dialogue. And I don't know if it's even facilitation. Maybe it's convening conversations. Absolutely. I mean, we express it sometimes as like how do we build the relational capacity in the system where yes, the client might call ourselves for seemingly, you know, an innovation program. But really if you weave the right people and build trust, build shared language, build shared tools, there is an endemic way of working together of a collaboration culture that sticks and once that sticks, they don't need us anymore. That's the beauty. So we see these transitions. It's not even a transformation sometimes. It's just a transition. In three acts, sometimes you have to find the right seeds. We find the metaphor of gardening or biology works much better. So you find the right seeds. You set the right boundaries of the system. Not everyone is part of the community. That's a misnomer. So when they say we have a 10,000 people community in our company, that's a network. That's the best that the community is something well defined, you know who is part of it. You have direct relationships with them. It cannot scale that easily. It can just move in different fractals. So if you build that relational capacity, then yeah, it starts with seeding, having the right people, the right strands there, that can take sometimes three to six months to then grow a way of working that is hopefully more akin to what the leadership wants, which is more speedy, more agile, but also more results oriented without skipping over the relationships bit. But then once you start up, it's used as like zero to one and one to end, right? The product market fit. Sometimes we describe it as like a community platform fit. Because once you know that the right digital experiences, lure people in the right incentives, keeps them in the game. The right physical convenings build trust. And you have dialed all of these well. Then the scaling happens really well. But if you don't get it right, if you try to accelerate it too much and say, hey, we've been doing events with the thousand people over the whole five years. And people show up and people go and it kind of dissipates. Our general biases, okay, let's go back to your 15. Who are your core 15 founding members? Why are they there? What can we get right there? Then they get, let's get to 50. Let's get to 150. And with the theory of change lands 15% of any system can change the whole system. That's, you know, if you give it three, four years to get that to that 15% that means your first acts may seem a bit small and humble. And that's okay. Your first acts can be a bit slow maybe. Of, you know, let's get the right system in place with a few people. And that is only possible if the leadership buys into this idea that exponential curves are flat in the beginning. That for a while you may not see that much difference. But once it moves, you have incredible competitive advantage because it has taken you two or three years to work under the soil to really really get the foundation, right? If a competitor says, well, I want the same community, well, good luck to them. They need two or three years to get there. You cannot accelerate it sometimes. So when we have the type of leader that appreciates this, there's amazing work that can be built because it's long-termist. But yeah, sometimes the current paradigm is also just like, let's make progress really fast and show some stuff and the power of big numbers. And in most cases we have seen over and over. It's very hard to differentiate that because it's the easy game. I hope that resonates. No, no, yeah, yeah. And I was thinking, as you were talking about, you ended up with long-term, I was thinking, you know, it's also patience. And I think unfortunately the focus is oftentimes on like, fast, quick solutions to show up things. And we recognize that if you're a leader in an organization, you'd need some sense of progress. But sense of progress can come with this beautiful off-site gathering that you do in your sixth week where the leadership is like, there's a change that I sense in the air like the way people are relating to one another, the way people are expressing their needs and the way we're creating some coherence and creating some clarity. That might be it, you know. And then maybe in 12th week you're like, wow, some initiatives are starting to spring up in places I didn't exist. So it's a bit like, you know, in a more emergent sense. A lot of current paradigm in the business world is dictated by management consultancies who have a primarily an analytical approach that tends to search for a lot of certainty. The leaders are then working with this certainty where they say, where are the best practices? Tell me where this has been done elsewhere in the world. And then I just lay out the railroad tracks and then I get going and deterministically I'll get to my goals. While it turns out the world is becoming more volatile, more uncertain, more chaotic, and there's no signal around us that is saying this is going to get easier. So in the complexity or systems theory, you basically just say, you take one step and you let that step inform your next step. I was really breathing this brief writing by Jason Fried who's the co-founder of Basecamp. He had this fascinating post about squirrels. He said, I would watch a squirrel for over the years. I'm not giving you the exact quote, but just the essence of it. Like the squirrel would run to a place, then stop, look around, run again to another place, stop, and run. I mean, that's how they move, right? And it's kind of confusing. Why are they not just running to where they ought to go? But that's a bit like navigating in the current world. You take a bit of a step ahead of time. Maybe you have a plan for the next three months. You really try to get there fast. Then you stop, you reflect, you look around, context as shifted. And then you run to another direction. So that being agile doesn't mean that you just keep running, running, running. People are exhausted. It's more like having this reflective practice built in. And especially if you do that reflection not as an individual, but as a community, that you're doing joint-sense making. You're collecting the weak signals. You're kind of creating future plausible paths. That actually also binds people together. Because then you're like, well, I don't know exactly where we are and where we need to go, but at least we are together. Yeah, it helps with embracing ambiguity when you're together. Exactly. I mean, that might sound like a trivial statement. But a lot of organizations are actually short now on engagement. They're short on a sense of belonging. They're short on shared mission. So if you don't stop the dance and look from the balcony where you are periodically, people are just dizzy these days. People are just-- they have nausea. It's like a sea sickness that surrounds us. So it turns out that the facilitative act as a designer is also a very strategic act because it helps to do that together rather than in your own trenches. You have to put a pose and help with a sense making. I like the squirrel. I was thinking of the hamster and the whale as the opposite of a squirrel jumping around the happily. So thank you for your time today. It's exciting to start with your social innovator in residence with this podcast. I know from talking with a few students and colleagues that there's been already quite a few fruitful conversations. So I'm really excited to continue this conversation. Great. Thank you so much. Thank you for listening to the design thinking round table produced by the Desert Slab at Novice Bee and the era chair in social innovation in partnership with the design lab at NYU Maker Space. This episode was recorded at Fidelidad Creative Studio. [MUSIC PLAYING]