AYSE BIRSEL — love good color

I was fortunate enough to work with Ayse in my work with Herman Miller (now MillerKnoll). For those of you who don’t know Ayse, the first thing you are struck by, aside from her talent, is her warm and giving nature. She understands design and the design process and can articulate it in a way that is memorable and meaningful. Ayse has designed award-winning products and systems with Fortune 100 and 500 companies, including Amazon, Colgate-Palmolive, Herman Miller, GE, IKEA, The Scan Foundation, Staples, and Toyota.
She is one of Fast Company’s Most Creative People 2017 and the author of Design the Life You Love, A Step-By-Step Guide to Building A Meaningful Future. If you can, attend her weekly Virtual Teas. It is there that you will witness the way she thinks, connects, and contributes to design and to humanity.

Laura Guido-Clark: WHEN I SAY THE WORD COLOR, WHAT DO YOU THINK OF?

Ayse Birsel: I think of you, Laura! Different things come to mind. Seriously, the first thing is you, but beyond that, is my lipstick color. Then I think of the lipstick to the rest of me, the role that color plays in what I wear. And then remembered how sometimes color is this instinctive sense that I have in clothing that happens without thinking. I don’t know where it comes from. But sometimes, I will go for a certain shoe with a certain color and suddenly that color and the other colors in my environment will start clicking. This matches this and this goes with this and with that, but it is not at all intentional.
I enjoy the intuitive sense of color, it is not something that I have to work on, it emerges. My love of color. The last thing that comes to mind is my colorful family, which is the family I have. We have all the colors in the world, me being super white, Bebe (my partner) being not even quite black but his dad being blacker, our kids being this beautiful café au lait color. There is this color spectrum in my life that comes from my family that I really love.

LG-C: CAN YOU SHARE A SIGNIFICANT COLOR MEMORY OR YOUR FIRST COLOR MEMORY?

Chanel ROUGE ALLURE VELVET Lipstick #56 Rouge Charnel

AB: When I talk about color memory, a couple of things come to mind. One, the appreciation of color, like the color of the Aegean Sea, and being mesmerized by that. My color memory is being very young and learning to mix colors, my art teacher showing me how to mix colors, and making color bars with my brush. Feeling how beautiful creating the colors is just for the sake of making colors.
You reminded me of a side conversation with Marshall Goldsmith, every Monday he gathers a group of people… my Virtual Teas were inspired by that. His topic was happiness, happiness for the sake of happiness. You can choose to be happy!

LG-C: HOW DO YOU USE COLOR FOR SELF-EXPRESSION?

AB: My lipstick is my self-expression and my signature color. Something I started doing when I was younger and it has become part of who I am. If you described me to someone I think you would say, “She wears this red lipstick.”
Being a New Yorker, I wear a lot of black, but I find that carrying color close to me is a joyful thing. I do have a lot of color in what I wear, it doesn’t cost a lot. It is not like painting a room. At one point I was radical and stopped buying anything black. When you do that you find color within itself can coordinate, the more color you have the easier it gets to mix and match.
Black is the absence of color… it is practical. But color is more self-expressive, almost being more visible and intentional. It is less automated. When you wear and use color people notice it. It says something about you. When you wear black and something is not as expressive as color, form has to come into play. So, if I wear a bright orange sweater, it is simple but says something. Wearing black requires something else out of the ordinary. It requires an additional question, is there more? My drawings are black lines, but always with a color accent. If they were only black they would be too serious. You would not know where to look. As soon as you add the orange-red it says here is the background and here where I want you to focus.

LG-C: WHICH ONE OF YOUR SENSES, ASIDE FROM SIGHT, DO YOU MOST ASSOCIATE WITH COLOR?

AB: Both sound and taste. The first thing that comes to mind is sound. Sound definitely has color. Sound can be mixed like color.
Taste because food is so visual and you have a sense of a red strawberry vs. a green cucumber.

LG-C: HOW & WHERE DOES COLOR PLAY A ROLE IN YOUR WORK?

AB: In my work which is mostly product design and industrial design, I see it truly as a place where I collaborate. You and I have collaborated on that. I have worked with color experts, what I really love about your and others' expertise is that allows what I am designing to be so much better. I like not having the responsibility for that. I often see my designs without color but know that a good color designer will know how to make them better. How colors and different materials are layered. What is so interesting in industrial design is how things come together. In a product, you may have different materials like black metal, black wood, and black leather. Even though they are the same color and can't be perfectly matched, it is the way they play together that is always a reveal (or surprise) to me. I can trust someone to do it. My work is about systems, so I want color systems to have logic, where is it coming from, and how does it communicate the idea?
Even though I don’t do it I want to make sure that when someone is suggesting a color I know that the color design reflects the quality. Clarity? Simplicity? What would clarity and simplicity of color mean? The whole story of color is so interesting to me. It has to be coherent and consistent with the rest of the design.

LG-C: WHAT IS SOMETHING YOU SAW LATELY THAT WAS COLOR CAPTIVATING OR REVELATORY?

AB: The example that comes to mind is from my partner, Bebe Seck. Bebe just designed a Senegal house at the Royal Design expo in Dubai. Senegal is an African country, and our perception of Africa is so colorful. Bebe is dedicated to design in Senegal and I was curious how he would represent Senegal visually in a world expo, also knowing that other African exhibitions would be creating colorful interiors and patterns. What he did was brilliant.
He created a background of black and white color patterns and took the color out to appreciate the pattern for what they are. Then he layered colorful images into posters and graphics. I saw that and felt it was so smart. It took what we were familiar with, and what good design does is create an intervention so we can still recognize its familiarity, but he took it to a new place. You can see it with a new eye. He did that through the absence of color next to the abundance of color.

LG-C: IS THERE ANYONE WHO HAS INFLUENCED YOU WITH REGARD TO COLOR?

AB: Most of the things that I love in terms of design are sculptural and architectural and, funny, don’t have much color to them. I think of Noguchi’s work, it doesn’t have color but it influences me.
I think often we are trained as industrial designers to think of form first, without color. We add color later. When you design in form first there is an absence of color.

LG-C: WHAT COLOR CHALLENGES DO YOU FACE?

AB: On a professional level I work with great people so I don’t worry about it. On a personal level, it is color in the context of space. Getting the right color and knowing where to put it in. First, it is getting the right color and then applying it. When it is incorrect you live with it for a while.

LG-C: DO YOU HAVE A PHILOSOPHY YOU WORK BY?

AB: My philosophy is Design the Life You Love. Within that context, it's about simplicity beyond complexity. The idea of less is more and that design is human-centered. My favorite design is the one that happens between you, your life, and the design process. It is another way of saying design your life.
At the end of the day, we are, as designers, designing people’s lives. Through it, my own understanding of my role has changed. The person who best understood that is Steve Jobs. He truly did see design as the design of life where products are props.