PELIN SU POLATOGLU
PORTFOLIO
index
statement .....................................................................................................................................................................................1 application: Run TU Run ................................................................................................................................................................2 educational VR: Habitable Exoplanets in a VR environment ............................................................................................................4 art project with neural networks: The Joy of Iterating .......................................................................................................................6 interactive installation: [IN] VISIBLE AIR ........................................................................................................................................8 application for Vodafone: Yesile Saygi (Respect for Green) .............................................................................................................10 digital transformation project for Vodafone Foundation: Coding Tomorrow ..........................................................................................11 art direction in a short movie: Mechul ..............................................................................................................................................12 booklet for Royal Academy of Art: An Amazon Mechanical Turk’s Life ...............................................................................................14 some paintings, some sketches ........................................................................................................................................................15
contact .........................................................................................................................................................................................16
I think and work on the impact of the digital transformation on human behaviour and society. I have done applied research in my academic and professional life to understand human behaviour.
 
 Even when I am not working, I am always observing, connecting, questioning, understanding.
Driving innovation and facilitating users’ interaction with technological products is my passion. I worked in the tourism industry as well as an international technology company. I enjoy the fast paced, project based culture. This environment enables me to learn continuously and fosters my intrinsic motivation. Delivering findings to departments and seeing the application is truly fascinating for me.
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Run TU Run, TU Deflt Run TU Run application was designed as an assignment for the Behavior Change Support Systems course in TU Delft. The product vision was “To encourage TU Delft students to achieve their running goals in a healthy manner and help build a running community across the campus”. The underlying idea behind the vision is to improve runners’ health and prevent possible physical strains they may have. A detailed Change Support Strategy plan was put together in order to not only encourage students to run but also to keep away from possible injuries.
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The app is targeted for a small community, TU Delft students. We built personas and user stories on our target users. We split our behaviour plan into 5 phases: awareness, preparation, run, evaluation and maintenance. Each phase contains multiple user actions that the user has to perform for the Behaviour Change Support System to work as intended.
We made a customer experience map and a change support strategy.
Any possible touchpoints our system can support are noted and for these touchpoints we provided a supporting service for the user as well as including gamification strategies to support the engagement. Such strategies include variable rewards, We identified the potential challenges in the behaviour plan. The funnel is split into 5 different phases: Cue, reaction, evaluation, ability, timing. We looked at what could potentially go wrong in each of these phases of the user’s journey and tried to find out how our system can help the user stay inside the funnel though all the phases and manage to reach the desired target outcome.
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Habitable Exoplanets in a VR environment Together with a computer science student, we created a VR interface that demonstrates the existing data on Earth’s current resources in a comprehensive way. Then presents the possible opportunities of habitable exoplanets discovered to date. With this VR installation we are introducing the users to the concept of “habitable exoplanet�.
Global warming, sustainability, finite resources and "planet B" are frequently discussed topics. Nevertheless many people are not informed about possible scenarios and what does a Planet B actually look like. As our target user, we identified children from the age of 8 to 14 and the setting for the installation to be a science museum -Naturalis in Leiden to be exact.
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Our research stemmed from our curiosity about whether providing an immersive and embodied environment would increase the learnability and memorability of the information on space exploration. We thought to actually explain the very complex-looking space exploration might help the public, especially kids to perceive the abstract data in a more concrete way. We created an interface that demonstrates the existing data on Earth’s current resources and habitable exoplanets, informing the users with an embodied approach.
 
 Our results demonstrated a potential ease in perception of the scientific data, possibly the reason being the advantages of using HTC Vive hand controlers and VR.
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The Joy of Iterating This is a reference to Bob Ross’ TV program, The Joy of Painting. Everything the program uses as a media can be considered are the things I wanted to contrast: TV, TV program, speaking, paint, canvas etc. As it is in The Joy of Painting program, the video shows the whole process of creating an artwork. Also, there are hot debates of whether fine art, especially painting is equally art when it is done by a Deep Neural Network. This work touches upon this subject. My goal was to make a work that is aesthetically fine, more importantly sarcastic, that makes you think and has a sense of humor. In this video you see the process of style transfer with a deep neural network. I found this neural algorithm in Github. It required a strong GPU, so I had a deal with a high school friend to remotely connect to his GPU. The system separates and recombines the content and style of provided images. I’ve provided a content and a style image. As style images, I chose the self-portrait series of Francis Bacon. As content images I took some photos of fellow classmate Matthias König. The system transfers the stylistic characteristics of Francis Bacon to the photos I provided.
This is a Phyton based Tensor Flow implementation. I am using the VGG datasets' pretrained weights. 6
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[IN] VISIBLE AIR By Sander de Jong, Su Polatoglu & Winke Wiegersma Part of the NMNT Open Lab Expo 2018 Hacking Nature
‘Its minuscule components are so smooth that one can barely feel it’ (Plato in Timaeus, c. 360 BCE.) CONCEPT The air [omni-present. ever-present. fugitive] we breath [subconsciously. autonomously]. Humans have the innate tendency to categorize [nature]. We categorize to understand, to visualize and to organize. What if we categorize the invisible? Air is a cocktail of intangible substances. It is ubiquitous, yet invisible. It is taken for granted yet it is the primary source of life. There is a lot of discussion around air. Allegedly, it is warming up, full of toxics, harmful, et cetera. Do we understand what air consists of, what these discussions are all about, when the air is so abstract, so ‘ungraspable’? Plato once associated the element of air with the octahedron, a geometrical shape of eight equilateral triangles, coining it the ‘Platonic solid’.
[IN] VISIBLE AIR tried to make the intangible (a little bit more) tangible, the invisible visible. It aimed to create an immersive space, where the audience would experience something that is so essential to our lives, yet is often overlooked due to its abstractness.
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INSTALLATION We created an installation where we addressed these questions. By projecting real-time data of air quality onto actual physical particles of air, our aim was to create an immersive experience of air and make our audience aware of the omnipresence of air. We have constructed 120 plastic and paper octahedrons which we hung in a completely (self-built) white space. We used p5.js, a JavaScript library for Processing, to visualize real-time data from the Air Quality Index database. Subsequently, this visualization was projected onto the shapes, creating a 3D and dynamic environment, enhanced by the oscillating fan causing the shapes to 'dance' and the ambient music playlist that was selected for this installation.
PROJECTION We used perlin noise for our data visualization as its organic and natural behaviour matches the ephemeral character of air. The lines representing the data never stop but are subject to continuous morphing, based on the data coming in. Every ten seconds, data from a random city is picked and its rating is translated to the thickness of the lines, which subsequently morph to the specific thickness. The words that appear are the result of our research and associative brainstorming. They were paired - word pairs always appear simultaneously on the projection, but location is random. The better the rating, the cleaner the installation: lines are thin and few words appear. The worse the data, the more cluttered the installation: lines are thick and words pollute the space.
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Yesile Saygi for Vodafone (Respect the Green) In my internship for Vodafone CSR and Sustainability department, in 2016, I was responsible of the design process of the to-be-launched mobile application “Yeşile Saygı” (Respect the Green). The app aims to gamify sustainability initiatives for its users. I mainly contributed in terms of developing the internal communications plan and ensuring a quality user experience. We aimed our employees and the public to take their first step towards an eco-friendly, sustainable future by downloading the Vodafone Respect the Green app now for Android and IOS. Our value proposition was as follows: Learn about environmental and sustainability issues, organic products sold in nearby markets in Istanbul, recycling points and parks around you. By calculating how much carbon footprint you have with the carbonmeter feature, you can make your transportation choices accordingly.
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Coding Tomorrow for Vodafone
As part of the Coding Tomorrow project launched in partnership with the Habitat Foundation, Vodafone has been providing coding tutorials to children aged between 7-14 across Turkey since August 2016. The aim is to give the children an understanding of the four core values of the “Do It Yourself” culture: imagine, design, do and share. We believe this will make it possible to raise a generation that does not only consume but also produce technology. The tutorials trigger the children’s imagination and allow them to transform their ideas into designs. In our tutorials, we used a program called “Scratch” developed by MIT, which is recognized as the best technical university of the world. “Scratch” allows the kids to get the gist of programming and do exercises release their creativity and build their fantasy world and design their own games. I was the end-to-end responsible for the project. My routine tasks involved coordinating between the company and collaborators, ensuring every social media & PR initiative was carefully planned and implemented. I also traveled to 5 different cities and thaught the children how to use Scratch.
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Mechul I was the Art Director of this short film together with my friend Hilal. Our role was providing creative vision and concept design. Working on the visual representation of the characters, themes and concepts for each scene. Planning and executing the color scheme, atmosphere, costumes, hair and make- up, monitoring the editing in the post-production phase to ensure that the look is appropriately conveyed.
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An Amazon Mechanical Turk’s Life This booklet was not distributed and was merely an art project for the Graphic Design course I took in the Royal Academy of Arts.
The booklet includes some sketches I made and the type of images Turkers filter for search engines. I sourced these images from LiveLeak.com.
I made a booklet on the problematic physicological and psychological state of a Mechanical Turk worker. This booklet demonstrates an extremely distressful state of a worker who filters gruesome images of war crimes, murder and sexual violence every day for news outlets and search engines. I also wanted to convey the alarming state the worker is in each second of the day, through the flow of the booklet. Turkers are always on the edge of their seat because of not knowing when a microtask (HIT) would come and having to catch the task on time as they are competing with millions of other "Turkers".
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art
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+31 620749259
psu.polatoglu@gmail.com
Leiden University Advanced Computer Science Faculty M.Sc. Media Technology
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