Celebrating design excellence, the 34th Rowena Awards honored the design team of Birsel + Seck and Joshua Longo. These designers represent a wide range of industrial design, from transportation and furniture, kitchen tools, and sculpture worldwide to the design of living itself.
Ayse Birsel (pronounced Eye-Shay), MID ’89, practiced Rowena’s exercises, making beautiful forms at Pratt. She now applies the design process to people with her step-by-step guide, Design the Life You Love. Through her books, training programs, and keynotes, she teaches people and coaches entrepreneurs, corporations, and communities how to solve problems by designing their lives and work. She is expanding now with Design the LONG Life You Love.
Birsel was born in Turkey, where she studied Industrial Design at Middle East Technical University (METU). In 1989, she came to Pratt to earn a MID as a Fulbright Scholar. She started her career collaborating with her teacher, Bruce Hannah. She then founded her product design studio, Olive 1:1, which evolved into a design and innovation studio with her partner Birsel + Seck.
Bibi Seck was born in Paris, raised in London and Dakar, and earned his Master’s in industrial design from ESDI. They met in Paris, where he was Renault’s lead designer for 12 years; two of his cars were named Car of the Year. Birsel + Seck created office systems for Knoll and Herman Miller included in the permanent collection of MoMA. In 2024, the New York Times designated their work one of the 25 Most Defining Pieces of Furniture From the Last 100 Years. Their clients include 3M, Aetna, CITI, CVS, Herman Miller, JA Worldwide, and Toyota. Seck founded Dakar Next in Senegal to bring good design practices to West Africa and eco-friendly products to the world.
Have you ever had someone who “formed” you in a fundamental way?
For me, that person is Rowena Reed Kostellow.
Rowena was my teacher at Pratt and my first friend in New York City. Her SoHo loft on Greene Street, with windows at both ends, was the first New York apartment I ever saw.
She always dressed in black—a black t-shirt, black leggings, and black sneakers. She’d buy sandwiches from Dean & Deluca or Olive’s, wrapped in wax paper. She’d eat half and save the other half for later
She made abstract and difficult spatial concepts accessible. Rowena deconstructed three-dimensional structures—products, cars, sculptures, interiors, and architecture—into their elements, then reconstructed them into an accessible methodology of form-making. She taught thousands of students how to design in space, like it was music.
As a musician develops an “ear,” Rowena helped us develop an “eye.”
We arrived spatially illiterate and left knowing how to combine and manipulate visual elements to create beautiful forms and spaces. She taught at Pratt for four decades and even held Saturday classes at her home.
I was 20 when I met her. She was in her 80s. I followed her like a chick following her mom. She shaped me, not just as a designer, but for life.
Sometimes, you are so close to something, you can’t see it. It took me decades to realize that I’ve been trying to emulate Rowena my whole life.
In 2017, I spoke about Designing a Meaningful Life at the Indaba Design Conference and used Rowena as my hero in my Heroes exercise. As I stood on stage in front of 800 people, it suddenly hit me: eating my sandwiches in halves, living in a loft in NYC, wearing black, deconstructing my experiences to create new design methodologies and tools, making abstract concepts accessible, and teaching them to thousands—I’ve been modeling Rowena all my life.
She is with me every day.
Ayse
Joshua Longo, BID ’03, credits “both Professor Lenny Bacich and the teachings of Rowena for this life of beauty and the design opportunities it has afforded me.” An artist, designer, and professor, he seamlessly navigates between industry, galleries, and the classroom. Longo’s professional journey includes designing products for Anthropologie, Macy’s, Ralph Lauren, Kohl’s, Target, and international sculptures and drawings exhibits and instructing design courses at Pratt, NJIT, Drexel, and MIT School of Architecture. His work has been featured in advertising campaigns and published worldwide. In 2019, Crate&Barrel recruited Longo to spearhead the creation of its product design Hardgoods division.
In addition, Longo was nominated for the Rowena Student Prize as a grad student, and Birsel designed the first Rowena Professional Award Trophy.
The event also celebrated this past year’s Rowena Student Prize winners: Katherine Thomsen (sophomore), Chanbin Im (junior), Peter Lim (senior), and Hiral Parmar (graduate student).