About

Design-Ist is a small design consultancy firm founded by Ozgur Kayhan. We provide fast, adaptive, and dynamic solutions for your design needs.  Design-Ist focuses on not only design innovation but also design process and innovation management. Our goal is help our clients to set their design strategy within their capabilities. We are based in Istanbul and willing to serve globally.

• We aim to help our client's strategic planning on design issues.
• We want our clients to take the competitive advantage of design (in a progressive way).
• We would like to help you to define your needs and transform your ideas to (new) products.

Ozgur Kayhan is an industrial product designer (BS, MSc ITU who has over 10 years experience of interactive design, advertisement, brand and product development. He is focused on NPD, design strategy and management of design process. He is currently studying on " Designer's Role in NPD Decision Process " for his PhD dissertation.

Ozen Bas is the co-founder of Design-Ist. She has a master's degree in Political Communication from the Institute of Communications Studies at the University of Leeds, the UK. In Turkey she received her high school degree from prestigious Robert College and at Bogazici University, had double majored Sociology and Political Science as her undergraduate degrees. After moving to the academic area of political communication she conducted her master's research on the online newspapers, user generated content, and participatory politics. Her broader academic and professional interests comprise online social networks, community research and online publishing.

As global competitive pressure increases, many companies are trying to shorten their product development time. Any firm that hopes to compete on the basis of innovation clearly must be proficient in all phases of the new-product development (NPD) process. However, in highly dynamic market situations, changes are so rapid and discontinuous that information collected at the beginning of a NPD cycle can become obsolete by the time of product launch.

The timely development of innovative new products is thus increasingly becoming a major source of competitive advantage in a growing number of industries. Design is a major key to innovate and create a difference. It is a vital source for maximization of profit and business success. According to us, design is one of the limited sources therefore it should be managed more efficiently like other sources.

Additionally, we are interested in socio-economic aspects of design and we would like to improve ourself on ways of maximizing social contributions of design. Since design penetrates into daily lives of people, its social aspects can not be easily neglected and the benefit of the design activities should not be limited to producing cheaper or good-looking products. There seems to be a misconception that design is just about art and its main concern is more about aesthetics; our goal is to evaluate the awareness of the socio-economical importance of its functionality, productivity, and efficiency. Contemporary design might be further developed with a social understanding which can be observed in sustainability, ease of use, ergonomics, and well-being of people.