*website under construction*

Hi! My name is Gizem, I'm a synthetic biologist, architect, and researcher, developing self-constructing biological structures by design.

My overarching scientific goal is to investigate social and biological systems' capacity for self-organization, as well as to develop tools for harnessing this capacity towards an efficient bottom-up governance of these complex systems.

Currently, my primary project is to create a synthetic biobot swarm (mammalian) that can execute a diverse set of tasks and generate complex behavior, such as collective self-assembly into larger-scale structures.

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About this website: Projects featured on this website fall into a continuum along the phenomenon of self-organization spanning from human social groups to swarm of  biobots and down to biological cells. Example projects range from cybernetic public spaces designed to provoke social interaction and foster a common ground between members of a society to DNA circuits engineered to enable living cells to interact with one another in pre-programmed ways to undergo  synthetic morphogenesis, and thereby self-construct into predefined structures.

As these projects vary in scale from meters to microns and in expertise from architecture to bioengineering and synthetic biology, their motivation stays the same: to create better built environments for the occupants of our planet and beyond.

 

Website design rationale: I started designing this website in 2013 during my junior year in architecture school (below is an early idea sketch). The design of this website arose from a recognition that although our concept of time has originally emerged from our ancestors' recording of cyclic phenomena (e.g., repeating seasons, rhythmic movements of celestial bodies, and natural cycles), modern humans can't seem to go beyond timelines when it comes to graphically representing the time, particularly when notating events in retrospect. I believe that this unreconciled dichotomy often results in ineffective and confusing linear representations of time, especially considering the fact that most of our contemporary organization schemes are still organized in a cyclic pattern (e.g., the academic year). To offer an alternative, this online portfolio was designed with a radial spatial organization in mind, refocusing our attention to the cadence of passing time.

                         An early sketch during the design process of this website, 2013.

 

More details on the design rational of this online interactive portfolio can be found below, in my two pages manifesto titled Salvation of Bits. This document was what I had sent to MIT in 2014 for grad school applications, instead of the required standard 30-pages PDF-formatted portfolio. My goal in sending this manifesto instead was to explain why I find PDF-formatted portfolios as a huge missing opportunities for design students. Details below.

https://issuu.com/gizemgumuskaya/docs/issuu_portf

(I share this here because I get the question of what I had sent in for my application a lot from prospective grad students who are in the process of application.)