Buse Aktas

Buse Aktas

The School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
buseaktas@g.harvard.edu

Buse, from Edirne, Turkey, is a graduate student in mechanical engineering and material science at the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. She is a part of the Harvard Biorobotics Lab, working on developing, modeling and analyzing tunable structures for use in soft robots.

In the context of Critical Media Practice, she is mainly interested in knowledge production and transfer within the context of scientific research, especially the moments when tacit and explicit knowledge meet in experimental settings. She uses live performance, installation, sculpture and social practice as forms, hoping to contribute to and expand our affective understanding of how we interact, engage and live with materials as we keep designing and redesigning them for new applications.

She has a background in mechanical engineering, traditional crafts, sculpture, and social practice. She received her undergraduate degree from Princeton University’s Mechanical Engineering and Visual Arts departments. As a major component to her practice, she has been doing extended fieldwork in the form of performative apprenticeships with traditional craftsmen in Turkey. She got her masters in Design and Cultural Heritage at Kadir Has University, and wrote a thesis about the theoretical implications of her socially engaged work titled: “Nudging Craft Heritage: A Non-Traditional Apprenticeship Model Using Artistic Research Methodologies.”

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