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Nesli Hazal Oktay is a long way from home. Born, raised, and educated in Istanbul, she went to France to study communications and media and later decided to pursue a master’s degree in interaction design in Tallinn at the Estonian Academy of Arts (EKA), followed by a doctorate in arts and design. Now an associate professor of interaction design at EKA, Nesli has been studying the way design co-creation can be used to support closeness between people.
Last fall, she defended her dissertation, “Far-away bodies: Co-creating design(s) in and for remote intimacy,” and this February she embarked on a two-year project called “Co-creating design(s) to support intimacy between remote families” (COD-F) which she sees as a follow on to her PhD. This new effort is supported by an EKA Creative Research Grant. In it, Nesli and fellow researchers will explore and merge interaction and social design, with a special focus on sensorial design. Their aim is to co-design embodied interactions in remote family settings.
Personal and theoretical
For Nesli, the focus of her research has always had both personal and theoretical bases. While doing her master’s at EKA in the interaction design program, which was established at EKA in 2016, she began studying how interaction happens over distances, and how emotional connections are maintained remotely. “This was my own lived experience of being far away from my loved ones,” Nesli says. While her personal situation is not uncommon in this era of globalization, it became magnified during the COVID-19 pandemic with its serial lockdowns.
“It became a more relevant issue for others to feel emotionally connected across distances,” says Nesli. “So it started with my own experience and it became bigger and more topical with the pandemic.”
The term “interaction design” might immediately bring to mind digital communication platforms, which was the way in which many people communicated during the pandemic and still do today. Originally, it did refer to the design of such interfaces, Nesli says, but as such technologies became ubiquitous, and the meaning of technology also shifted, interaction design evolved.
“It’s not just about interacting with a screen anymore,” says Nesli. “I see it as designing experience between humans, environments, systems, products, services, and other humans, even themselves,” she says. “It’s the design of experiences.”
As detailed in her 174-page dissertation, Nesli’s work is inspired by the method of embodied imagination, here defined as a creative integration of experiential practices from the worlds of participatory design and performance. She designed several experiments as part of her study in order to better understand intimacy, moving beyond language-oriented experiences into physical or bodily ones.
Close-to-body experiences
In the first experiment, she engaged five participants and an expert through a design ideation process, in which they concluded that close-to-body experiences should be tangible, ambiguous in content, and suggest caring. In the second, Nesli described how she and her father co-created bio-rings made of alganyl, a biodegradable plastic made of marine algae, as a close-to-body experience and explored how the wearing of these rings contributed to intimacy.
Nesli says she was inspired to create and study the use of bio-rings after attending the Design Research Society Conference in Bilbao, Spain, in 2022. Though biomaterials were a new field for her, through experimenting, she was able to make the bio-rings described in the dissertation.
As part of her study, three pairs also used these bio-rings as cultural probes, and in the dissertation, Nesli described how the participants’ relationships with distance changed as they co-created the rings, which led to spending time together, and then wore the rings as a way of carrying each other as a tangible object.
“The wearing of the rings made them carry each other to different places,” says Nesli. “It was a physical manifestation of their intimacy, and it created an excuse for them to talk about the rings.” As they are made of biodegradable plastic, the rings can change shape and consistency given the temperature and humidity, and can expand and contract. “These rings were meant to be strange, and they look strange to others who see them, but this created an excuse for the wearers to talk about their loved ones,” she says.
Co-creation and co-presence
For Nesli, the innovation of the bio-rings offered an opportunity to conduct research through design. By making something with materials, experiences were created among study participants. She notes how during the co-creation process, participants had to look in similar directions and undertake similar steps, therefore creating a co-presence.
The value of the work is that it provides ideas for other researchers too that wish to understand how experiences can be co-created to support intimacy across distances.
As Nesli wrote in her conclusion, the study challenged conventional methods and advocated for embodied design practices and approaches. It also opened new design spaces for supporting intimacy across distances, inviting interaction designers and design researchers to “rethink and reimagine how humans experience and build intimacy in an increasingly digital world.”
At home at EKA
When Nesli came to EKA in 2017 to pursue her master’s, it wasn’t her first time in the Estonian capital. As Eramus students in France, she and her partner decided to visit Estonia as tourists in 2015.
“It was a cold January, but we fell in love with Tallinn back then,” recalls Nesli. “So when we were looking for our master’s options, we remembered this lovely city.” Her partner, now husband, went on to study at Tallinn University, and she got into the interaction design program at EKA. As an associate professor and member of EKA’s Sensorial Design research group, Nesli says she feels at home at the academy and in Tallinn in general.
“What I like about EKA is the sense of community, the fact that you have the option to do what you want to do and become who you want to become thanks to EKA’s open approach,” she says. The doors inside of EKA are made of glass, making it possible to see into classrooms, she noted, contributing to this sense of community and togetherness between students and teachers.
Nesli feels that her teaching as an associate professor at EKA feeds her research and vice versa. “Design research cannot be done all alone,” she says. “It always happens in a context with people and for people. Teaching feeds my design research and design research feeds my teaching,” says Nesli.
“That’s why I applied for this new two-year project,” she adds. “I see it as a way to enrich my teaching and to give our master’s students some more familiarity with the design research context.”
This article is written by Justin Petrone. This article was funded by the European Regional Development Fund through Estonian Research Council.
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