The Designing Brain: John Gero Seminar at ITU Taşkışla

Istanbul Technical University’s Faculty of Architecture hosts The Designing Brain, a seminar by John S. Gero, on 12 October 2026 at 16:00 in Room 126 of the Taşkışla building. Gero is a Research Professor in Psychological and Brain Sciences at Drexel University and was previously Professor of Design Science and Director of the Key Centre of Design Computing and Cognition at the University of Sydney.

The talk starts from a simple question: what happens in your brain when you design? Cheaper, non-invasive brain measurement now makes it possible to study architects, engineers and industrial designers while they work, and Gero will present what these studies have found. Among the questions covered are whether architects and engineers show different brain activity, whether design tools and the teaching of design methods change it, whether a designer’s brain response can be used to improve ideation, and what effect using AI has.

Gero has been a visiting professor at institutions including MIT, Columbia University, UC Berkeley, UCLA, Carnegie Mellon and EPFL, and has written or edited 57 books and some 900 research papers. The seminar is listed for 16:00 to 18:00.