Born in the port city of Izmir, Turkey, a town more than 2,000 years old, Ayse Birsel absorbed a Mediterranean cosmopolitanism growing up.
She studied industrial design at Middle Eastern Technical University in Ankara, the capital of Turkey, from 1981 to 1985. A Fulbright scholarship brought her to the Pratt Institute in New York for work on her Masters degree. At Pratt, Ayse especially remembers Bruce Hannah, Rowena Reed, and Peter Barna, from whom she learned a "no-nonsense" view of design—as Ayse says, a way of "distilling problems, solutions, and forms to their essence." This became her design perspective—distilling problems to reveal novel answers.