Hi, I'm Meriç!
Profile
I'm a Turkish product designer, who currently works at LinkedIn. Previously, I got my masters in interaction design at Carnegie Mellon University and interned at Carbon Health SF.
Prior to digital product design, I worked on projects ranging from designing smart parking systems for cities and visual communications for a university to researching users' trust to autonomy via products such as smart toilets.
As a designer, I'm motivated to be part of teams, who design interactive systems that increase meaningful social interactions through technology.
Recent recognition
Mentee — Andreessen Horowitz (a16z)
One of 30 students of Gen. Design Program Cycle V '18
IBM Watson Prize — Emirates ML & AI Hackathon ‘17
Designed “EM: A Conversational Travel Companion”
Works Shortlisted — Interaction Awards ‘18 by IxDA
”Future Voices” and “Project Sheeperd”
Thesis Grant — kynamatrix Research Network ‘18
Thesis Proposal: “Designing ‘Trustworthy’ Interactions for Opening the Black Box of Autonomous Agents”
Participated — Google SPAN Pittsburgh '17
Assisted a Product Demo: “Dranimate by Ali Momeni”
Photography
To give back to the community, I've been sharing photos on Unsplash since October 2017. They've been viewed over 100 million and downloaded over 500,000 times so far.
Some of my photos on Unsplash have been featured by Google Store as well as media outlets such as Fast Company, CNN Türk, Vogue, Marie Clarie, Atlas Obscura, and Süddeutsche Zeitung.
Music
While I played a baritone at 13 and recorded some hip-hop tracks at high school, my current interest in music is around discovery.
Often times I'd share pieces of music I found with my friends and they'd criticize me discovering songs so late. One day a friend said "I'm glad that you've finally got Internet in your cave.", which inspired me to collect all the songs I discovered at my cave on Spotify. Nowadays, I'm mostly into organicá and study techno, yet maintaining more than 15 genre playlists.