Hazal Ertürkan is a researcher and multidisciplinary designer. Over four years, in TU Delft and Caradt, Avans University of Applied Sciences, she has honed her skills as a designer and researcher, contributing to cutting-edge projects where she explored how living ‘materials’ and artefacts, which habituate living microorganisms (e.g., bacteria, algae and mycelium), would evoke experiences and ultimately would transform our way of living in the future. She conducted projects with multidisciplinary teams (including biologists, storytelling experts, and researchers) on living materials, immersive digital tools (e.g., AR and VR) and storytelling methods. During the project, she mentored master’s graduation projects, gave lectures, coached students, and designed research artefacts. In 2020, her design for the Still Alive Exhibition in Het Nieuwe Instituut, Glow the Way, was exhibited at Dutch Design Week 2020 and published in the book Still Alive 2020. In 2021, she collaborated with Affect Lab and storytelling expert Sarah Lugthart to create a worldbuilding and speculative storytelling toolkit called Miraculous Futures of Living Materials to envision alternative futures where humans have a symbiosis with living materials. Her work has been published in various international conferences, such as DRS 2022, ELIA Biennial 2022, and IASDR 2023.

In 2021, she started collaborating with the interdisciplinary Dutch experience design collective Polymorf in the project Future Botanica, where she is the lead designer and researcher. This project is funded by Stimuleringsfonds Creatieve Industrie and MU Hybrid Art House, and it will be exhibited during Dutch Design Week 2024. In 2023, she founded a multidisciplinary research and design studio, Studio Bleu. Studio Bleu’s  research and design project, Second Skin, is funded by Caradt, Avans University of Applied Sciences. This research guided the development of the multisensory XR dining experience Microbiome Restaurant; she is the co-owner and co-director of the project with Marcel van Brakel, founder and lead designer at Polymorf. Microbiome Restaurant was presented for the first time in IDFA DocLab in November 2023.

Hazal Ertürkan’s body of work is driven by a deep sense of responsibility towards the environment and ‘more than human’. It focuses on experience design, novel narrative forms, and physical/digital mediums to inspire future alternative ways of living and harmonious coexistence between humans, nature and technology.