Yekta Bakırlıoğlu is a Senior Lecturer in Design Management at ImaginationLancaster and Postgraduate Director of Studies in Design at LICA. He is also a Trustee of Manchester Craft and Design Centre. Before taking on this position, Yekta was an Assistant Professor at the Department of Industrial Design, Middle East Technical University, Turkey, and a TUBITAK CoCirculation2 (MSCA-CoFund) Fellow with his DF-MOD (Distributed Fabrication through Mass-produced Open Designs) project. He was also a researcher at Koç University, as part of the Pop-Machina H2020 R&I project. Between 2017 and 2019, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Limerick, Ireland, as part of the Circular Design (L4IDS) Erasmus+ KA project. In 2016, he was a visiting researcher at NODUS Sustainable Design Research Group, Aalto ARTS, Finland.

Yekta’s research interests span three distinct yet interrelated pillars: (1) open design and distributed production/economies, (2) design for sustainability and circular economy, and (3) new concerns of design management (including gender, collaboration, models of innovation and transitions). He has published in various interdisciplinary academic journals and presented his work in international conferences and other venues.

Yekta Bakırlıoğlu's full list of publications can be viewed here