Gökhan MURA

Gökhan Mura, PhD., is an Assistant Professor at the Visual Communication Design department at Izmir University of Economics, Izmir, Turkey. He is also the coordinator of the Design Studies MA and PhD programs of the faculty. He teaches undergraduate studio as well as MA and PhD courses. Gökhan Mura received his PhD in Industrial Design at Istanbul Technical University in 2014 with his research on digital visual sources of collective and creative idea generation. His thesis work on the creative use of user-generated photographs for idea generation consisted of idea generation workshops with novice designers in experience and interaction design processes. During his PhD he spent an academic year in Malmö University School of Arts, Culture and Communication working on various interaction design projects as well as teaching as a guest lecturer. Gökhan Mura also worked as a Research Associate at Loughborugh University Design School as a part of EU funded FP6 Project ENGAGE, a project aimed to collect tools and methods for designing for emotions. He received his MA degree on Visual Communication Design from Istanbul Bilgi University and received his BSc. in Industrial Design from Middle East Technical University, Ankara. His research interests encompass various design disciplines with a keen interest in the relation of design and technologies of visual representation. He works on digital and collective visual narratives for design and creativity. He is interested in the culture and visual storytelling capabilities of user-generated media and its employment as a tool for co-research to foster people-based creativity. He has been conducting design workshops in different design areas, recently more concentrated on co-design and community based development projects. As a new research project, he is working on collecting and documenting stories of immigration through visual narratives of immigrant workers via their gifts.