Faculty Spotlight with Gürkan Maruf Mihçi

Teaching students how to communicate and inspire the world through the use of design, get to know the faculty of Visual Communication Design at IUPUI Herron School of Art + Design.

For this week’s faculty spotlight: 10 Questions with Gürkan Maruf Mihçi, Assistant Professor and Co-Coordinator of Foundation Studies.

1. Who are you and what kind of work do you do now? I am Gürkan and I teach at Herron Visual Communication Design and Foundation Studies. gurkanmihci.com

2. How did you get into design? My father has a paper company, I worked with printing houses, and my childhood friends were also interested in art and design. So my family and friends encouraged me to study design.

3. Before you chose design, did you consider doing anything else? I considered being a Ninja but later I learned that it is an out of date job. I am still thinking about it.

4. What kind of student were you? I remember I hated being in kindergarten, and I hated school until my junior year in my undergrad. I met a very inspiring professor, she changed my views and that year I was awarded as a Honor student and I decided to be a lecturer.

5. What’s your most favorite project that you’ve ever worked on? I’ve worked for an event organization company as a freelance motion graphics designer and designed many video projection mappings and installations for events of the banks, champagne, cosmetics, and exhibitions for a couple of years. It was so fun to design these works because I was also attending the events and got to see users’ experiences during the events.

6. How do you get out of a creative block? I watch movies, read books, listen to music, and travel for inspiration.

7. How do you manage your time when you work on multiple projects at once? Honestly, I have no idea how I should manage my time when I work on multiple projects at once. I just work.

8. What design trend do you wish would die? I don’t like the plastic 90s computer style with emojis design trend between 2016–2020. I am so scared that 5–6 years later, designers will be reinventing the millennium Y2K style from 1999–2002.

9. Who is your non-design role model? I have billions of role models; musicians: Ludwig van Beethoven, Aphex Twin, and Delia Derbyshire, thinkers; Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Michel Foucault, and Simone de Beauvoir, directors; Michelangelo Antonioni, and Andrei Tarkovsky, authors; Isaac Asimov, Ursula Le Guin, and Blake Crouch.

10. What advice do you wish someone had given you when you were a student? Be curious, and travel, after the pandemic of course.