Ayse Birsel and Bibi Seck / Birsel+Seck
New York
Product designers Ayse Birsel and Bibi Seck met while working on a Renault automobile interior in 2002. Since then, their collaboration has blossomed into a highly fruitful partnership as Birsel+Seck (not to mention marriage.) Their work for corporations such as Hewlett-Packard, Target, and Herman Miller—including their NeoCon Best of Competition–winning “Teneo” storage system—is surprising and innovative, but always remains focused on its end-user.
“DRAWING IS REALLY a language to me—my first language,” says Birsel. “As a child, I learned to draw around the same time I was learning to write. In terms of thinking, it’s as much a form of expression to me as speaking or writing. Sketching allows me to organize my thoughts; the clearer my thoughts, the simpler the sketches become. At the beginning of a project, they’ve very messy, as I’m searching for a solution and don’t yet know what to think. As I get the hang of it and I find the hook that gets me toward a solution, the sketching gets clearer and clearer. If I need to, I’m capable of doing very detailed sketches, but I really like the conceptual sketches, where it’s not so much the form of the product but the concept and the solution to the creative problem.”
Zoë Washlet Product Design
TOTO
Bibi Seck was lead designer at Renault for twelve years before his partnership with Birsel. He remembers sketching cars constantly as a boy, “and I never stopped.” For Seck, sketching is an intensely personal and powerful, even potentially dangerous, act. “I don’t draw to communicate my thinking to other people—it’s more a mirror of myself. As soon as I have the idea complete in my head, I stop drawing. It’s already there. Drawing is like a cane, something I use for support while I’m thinking.”
Generally, the pair sketch separately but alongside each other until eventually curiosity gets the better of one of them and he peeks over the other’s shoulder. However, each project unfolds differently. “Once, when we were working on a table collection for HBS, I sent Bibi some scans of my sketches; mainly to show him I hadn’t been goofing off in his absence,” recalls Birsel. “He called me and said, ‘Send me the sketch on the other page.’ On the scan, he could see the other side of the page bleeding through, and that image became the starting point for the collection. There’s something nice about working together. We see things the other doesn’t see in his own work; we spark ideas back and forth.
“We sketch in order to think; the core of our ideas are captured in our drawings. If Bibi and I were asked where an idea came from, we would show our sketchbooks.”
White Shirts Fashion Design
Bils
“In 2006, we designed five new shirts for Bils, a textile company in Istanbul. Our clients, Selman Sinha and Derya Bilsar, informed us that as long as the shirts were white we could design anything we wanted, and they would make sure they happened. So we did—starting with a black shirt. We called it the Black Sheep, and no one objected. Derya and the seamstresses at Bils produced complex patterns for the line that were shaped and contoured precisely as we had imagined them. They then asked us if we would mind being photographed wearing the shirts. Since we were in Dakar at the time, Bibi thought it a good idea to take the pictures there.
Which led to our meeting Bonbacar Touré Mandémory. When we asked Bonbacar if he had his book with him, he pulled out a mammoth tome from his bag. The book was called Snap Judgments, and it profiled an exhibit of the same name that featured his photographs at ICP in New York City last spring. The gallery, as fate would have it, was located just a few blocks from our midtown office.
While Bonbacar graciously waited for us to flip through the pictures, and as we recognized beautiful image after beautiful image, we felt those months of designing the shirts were a pretext leading us to Bonbacar and the chance to work with him. We met the next morning at 7:00 a.m., and with the shirts in our arms and Mandémory with his cameras in his bag, we took a taxi to the Corniche. With jogging young men and meditating elderly marabons as our witnesses, we posed.”
—Ayse Birsel
“Bibi draws like a god. A pen in his hands is truly a weapon; when we first started working together, it intimidated me, because I don’t have the same mastery that Bibi has. It took me a while to feel okay with it. We complement each other; we don’t duplicate each other.”
—Ayse Birsel