ATÖLYE transformed Private Sezin School’s primary school and kindergarten into a flexible pedagogical space that fosters meeting, learning, and working. Collaborating with the School Board, ATÖLYE employed a mental model that flips knowledge-centered experience towards a learner-centered one. To achieve this transformation, ATÖLYE went beyond architectural procedures to make the design process a truly user-centered one. ATÖLYE’s participatory method created room for co-imagining a future that the institution “eases into,” rather than “finds itself within.”

The Dubai Future Accelerators space hosts startups in cooperation with the government and private sector entities. With the right interventions, and by utilizing the strengths of the existing design, we set out to design an exploration and production space that is never underutilized. Out of the 80 hours of field research, a scenario-based layout system that enables different modes of interactions emerged.

In 2019, ATÖLYE joined kyu Collective members IDEO and Palmwood to design a transformative learning journey for the government of the UAE with the project “Design Gov.” The project addressed the nation’s goal of transforming towards a human-centered approach by empowering future leaders, aiming to embed creative mindsets and skills into the ways government officials think and work—enabling them to imagine and co-create meaningful solutions together with the people they serve.

Akbank Design Thinking Lab (Akbank DT Lab) is an experiential learning journey designed around the following critical question of how to empower Akbank’s teams to ignite the customer-centered transformation within the larger organization. The project aims to transform Akbank’s high-potential talent to become the enablers of well-designed and holistic customer experiences and to foster cross-departmental relationships between mid-level managers to lead the customer-centered change movement within the organization.