About

About Bedirhan Cinar (The Shorter Name-Dropping Version)

I am a designer living in my favorite part of the world, Brooklyn, NY. After finishing my Masters of Industrial Design (Pratt), I made toys (Marvel/Toy Biz) and designed furniture (Humanscale), engine housings (Caterpillar), and lighting (Mmckenna). I ended up co-founding an awesome but short-lived toy company (Sweetshop) and subsequently co-founded a fantastic but unread web magazine (Roda Magazine). During the last few years, in addition to client work and curating a video site (Show Us Your Clips), I taught design to high school students all over NYC through two incredible non-profit organizations (Urban Arts Partnership and Sweat Equity Enterprises). Since leaving teaching, the magazine, and the freelance world, I find myself in a wonderful position as the TED-Ed Web Specialist at TED. If there was a Venn diagram of everything I love to do professionally, my job at TED is the perfect center of it.

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About Bedirhan Cinar (The Longer “How I Got Here” Version)

I was born in Istanbul, moved to the suburbs of Chicago when I was five, and, after finishing college, moved to NYC in July of 2000. Now, you know how in movies there is some minor event that changes the protagonist’s life forever, setting them onto a great adventure to save the world/princess/rec center? A couple years ago, I figured mine out, my little catalyst that set unforeseen events in motion leading me to where I am today. You know what it was? This innocuous but massively influential event? It was when I watched Back To The Future Part 2 in junior high school.

Back To The Future Part 2 had hoverboards which are awesome. One year later, the trailer for Highlander 2 The Quickening had a guy that looked like he was hovering (and there were swords) so it had to be awesome too! It was not. However, before being put off by the sequel, I watched the original Highlander (which is super awesome) and between that and Star Wars, I was hooked on sword play. I started high school the next year where I immediately joined the fencing team and found a like-minded group of super nerds, one of whom is an actual super genius. His passion for learning lit a huge fire under my butt to the point that my senior year consisted of ditching lunch to spend extra time sculpting in the art studio and staying up all night studying AP Calculus and Physics. At that point, I didn’t know design existed as a career so I took my stock of my passions and decided I wanted to become a mechanical engineer and make robots.

Imagine my surprise when I got to Carnegie Mellon and realized that building the robots in my head would require tons of electrical and computer engineering. While I was a confident code writer and knew my way around a circuit board, I found the physical aspects of mechanical engineering much more interesting and enjoyable and thus shifted my focus towards Statics/Dynamics/Stress Analysis. It was during this passionate pursuit of structural knowledge (specifically around when I helped design and build a working steam-powered toothbrush) that I learned about the awesomeness that is Industrial Design and, after taking a series of design and prototyping classes, added the hybrid minor of Engineering Design to my MechE degree.

Upon finishing school, I was hired by Symbol Technologies (now Motorola) and began working as an Application Systems Engineer. Realizing that the Industrial Designers were having way more fun and making way cooler stuff, I began getting my Masters of Industrial Design. After a couple years of full-time work / part-time grad school, I quit my job, did a summer furniture design program in Copenhagen, and started grad schooling full-time. Fast forward through co-founding a toy company (Sweetshop), co-founding a web magazine (Roda Magazine), a design teaching career (Urban Arts Partnership), and countless freelance gigs and here I am – a Web Specialist at TED, an eager anticipant of tomorrow’s hoverboards, and a gigantic nerd.

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About Bedirhansolo.com

My first name is Bedirhan.  It is pronounced “Better”, like “better or worse”, and “Han”, like “Han Solo”.  Thus the website name “Bedirhansolo”.

← Me riding a unicorn!