Redesigning Industry

Archives of Blue begins with a fascination for how easily people can relate to different cultures through colour. In Archives of Blue, blue is used as a case study to investigate hidden stories of colour, and the work presents four themes that resulted from the research: material culture, biological evolution, colour language, and personal archives. Reflected through an immersive installation of various blue archives – including the ‘curtains of dyed memories’ and ‘Japan’s blue LED lights of sanity’ – the audio narrates a story around each archive and invites the audience to engage in their own interpretation of what they see in blue. Aiming to create an educational, immersive, and exploratory experience navigating how we relate to colour, Archives of Blue is a response to the relationship I hold with colour. In exploring personal memories, material archives, and visual artefacts, this project aims to showcase the power of emotions and reimagines the cultures of colour in design. 





Embracing my Turkish and English roots, I began by reflecting on colours that have surrounded my memories. I remember each blue nazar (evil eye) amulet – a dark blue eye-shaped bead believed to ward off the evil gaze – that I tried to bargain for at a decent price at the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul. I think of the dusted blue English porcelain that, since I was ten, has remained untouched in the living room cabinet. I look back at each photo I took embracing the blue hues of mosques, old temples, and local art decorations in Istanbul, and, finally, I can’t help but notice the dark blue marquee sign of our usual Fish and Chip shop, the Bizzie Lizzie’s in the town of Skipton. Each cluster of blue memories accumulated to reveal these blue archives as my only means to a cultural sense of belonging. 

Returning to the Netherlands last summer, suddenly the city’s colours shifted to create an orange ambience, where red bricks heated the insides of our houses, and barely any shade protected us from the giant orange ball that heats our streets, homes, and bodies. I took notice of the dominance of colours in cities and felt, now more than ever, the realities of climate anxiety. Feeling an urgency to investigate the relationship between colour and temperature, I established my journey as a colour researcher, questioning how colours are interconnected with human cognition, and how the cultures of colour can respond to applications of design in changing conditions. Archives of Blue holds its cores principles in reciprocity with the book the Cultures of Colour: Visual, Material, Textual by Chris Horrock. In application of these principles, the collection of blue archives experiments with aesthetics to emphasise the biological, cultural, and emotional response we have to and with colour.








As a designer, I embrace storytelling as a mode in my work, uncovering hidden life cycles of things and material origins of cultural reservoirs and societal values. Bridging the worlds of my background in industrial design engineering with a more creative and artistic approach at the Master of Industrial Design, this friction shifted my position as an industrial designer to that of a narrator of material and people. I learnt to become a material designer, a storyteller, a maker of things, a colour researcher, and a (re-)designer for industry.