Designing from Real to Ideal: A Workshop with Ayse Birsel
We recently had the pleasure of welcoming back Ayse Birsel, a founding faculty member of SVA’s Products of Design program, for an intimate one-hour workshop with students. An internationally recognized designer and author of Design the Life You Love, Ayse’s return felt especially meaningful both for the faculty who were excited to have her back and for Ayse herself who spoke about SVA as a kind of home.
Ayse began with a simple idea: our brains are prediction machines. While useful, they can keep us locked into familiar patterns. Patterns that are difficult to escape.
Just as quickly as she introduced the idea, she disrupted it, dancing across the projector screen to 1954 film There's No Business Like Show Business. The room shifted.
She shared a story of dancing to that very song with Marshall Goldsmith before a presentation. She described how he had “tricked” her into letting go of her stage fright through something as simple and silly as a dance. What stayed with her was not just the humor, but the generosity behind it. It was a reminder that sometimes we need to be gently pulled out of our own way.
In that same presentation, she found herself returning the gesture. She invited Marshall, along with the audience, to write down their heroes, the people they admired most, and the qualities that made those individuals meaningful to them. As people began to share, speaking to the values they saw in others, she introduced a small shift. She asked them to cross out their heroes’ names and replace them with their own.
In that moment, admiration turned inward and became something immediately personal and actionable.
She brought this same exercise into the room with the PoD cohort. The entire room, composed of a mix of students and visitors, shared figures both deeply personal and widely known, from family members to musicians and actors. As the exercise unfolded, the room opened up. It became less about who we look up to and more about what qualities we want to recognize within ourselves.
At the core of Ayse’s talk was the idea of moving from real to ideal, designing the life you have into the life you want. Getting there, however, requires learning how to move past the part of the mind that resists change.
Drawing from her experience in karate, she introduced the concept of a feint, a small distraction used to shift attention and create an opening. Students couldn’t help but smile as she shared her journey from novice to black belt, brought to life through a live demonstration with a volunteer from the audience. Here’s a fun snippet from the demo:
This, she described as her “special sauce.” It is a way of designing without letting your head get in the way, a way of gently tricking the mind into stepping aside and making space for ideas that might otherwise never surface.
The goal is not perfection, but a shift in state toward being optimistic, open-minded, and opportunity-aware.
In just an hour, Ayse reminded us that design is not only about what we make, but how we choose to live. It was a gift to have her back at SVA, sharing that perspective where it all began.