Liana Kuyumcuyan is a social designer based in Istanbul, Turkey.

 

She studied Industrial Design (BA) at Istanbul Bilgi University and Social Design (MA) at Design Academy Eindhoven. She graduated with Architecture and Urban Studies (MA) at Istanbul Kadir Has University, with her thesis called Micro-publics: Sitting outdoors as a resilient practice in a transforming city. Currently, she is a doctoral candidate at the National Technical University of Athens in the Department of Architectural Language, Communication, and Design, focusing on her thesis called A comparative study on micro-publics: Sitting outdoors in Istanbul, Athens and Naples.

 

She is a member of Urban.koop, a network where innovative urban policies, strategies, designs, and practices are produced by pooling social resources. She is currently working on a project called Futures of Listening: Water Knowledge from Two Cities to foster a platform for listening to water knowledge from vulnerable local communities in Jakarta and Istanbul, which demonstrates prolonged water-related risks due to the climate crisis. 

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She was the project and event coordinator of Postane, an urban hub for social change in Istanbul. She ran the research project Searching for a Cosmopolitan City in a Building, which collected archives about the Postane building, originally built as a British Post Office in 1859. Together with Murat Tülek, they wrote a book about the history of the building, called Postane: Archeology of a Building. 

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She has been the Executive Editor of Design Unlimited between 2019-2024, an Istanbul-based magazine focusing on thematic design concepts.

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