Hi, I'm Meriç!
Profile
I’m a product designer who focuses on designing for trust to accelerate technology adoption. Over the past decade I’ve worked on both globally scaled platforms and 0-to-1 products.
In recent years I’ve concentrated on consumer experiences and autonomy development tools, while earlier work spanned smart parking systems, corporate visual communications, and research into user trust in autonomy, including products like smart toilets.
Recent Experience
Shield AI 2024 – now
Hivemind Forge (workbench for autonomy development)
San Diego, CA
LinkedIn 2019 – 2024
Notifications, Growth, Events, Groups
San Francisco, CA ↔ Bangalore, India
IRL Labs 2017 – 2018
Dranimate, SimpleVR
Pittsburgh, PA
Carbon Health 2017 – 2017
Clinic 2.0, Website retouch
San Francisco, CA
Eczacıbaşı VitrA 2016 – 2017
VitrA V-Care (long-term adoption research)
Eskişehir, Türkiye
ODTÜ / METU 2014 – 2016
Corporate Communications
Ankara, Türkiye
Publications
Designing for Trust 2022
Thesis, Carnegie Mellon University Master of Design in Interaction Design
Pittsburgh, PA
Work in Progress paper, TEI' 2017 Proceedings
Yokohoma, Japan
Recent Recognition
Tones of UX 2022
Guest Lecture
Podcast (Turkish)
UX Coffee Hours 2021
Mentor
ETMK IDEA Söyleşileri (EN: IDEA Conversations) 2020
Speaker
Voice of UX Meetup #3, San Francisco 2019
Speaker
Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) Generation Design Cycle V 2018
Mentee
Shortlist – Interaction Awards 2018
”Future Voices” and “Project Sheeperd”
Photography
To give back to the community, I've been sharing photos on Unsplash since October 2017. They've been viewed over 450 million and downloaded over 4 million 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, 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 remixing, sampling, and discovery. (I say this, but then I'm also self-learning turntablism, and how to play trumpet and clarinet.)
Starting from late 2024, I've been live mash-up-ing my favorite Turkish songs with others – which has been a lot of fun. You can find songs I uploaded to Soundcloud and YouTube. Of course, these are for personal enjoyment, and all the rights belong to their respective owners. Respect! :)
Besides creating, 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/Apple Music. I'm mostly into organicá and study techno, yet maintaining more than 15 genre playlists.