Litho Hub

The capstone brief asked each group to identify a cultural actor in Ankara and work with them throughout the year. We collected and filtered more than 300 museums, studios, performance spaces, and independent organizations before choosing DOU Print Studio, a collaborative lithography studio working in a field none of us initially understood. That unfamiliarity became useful: before designing for visibility, we had to experience the same knowledge gap as the people we hoped to reach.

Research revealed that the main barrier was not a lack of historical or technical material. It was the way that material was distributed. Beginner resources were fragmented, specialist language assumed prior knowledge, and the chemical relationship between grease and water was difficult to understand without seeing or trying the process. The opportunity became an onboarding problem: how could one system create several credible ways into the craft?

The hub reduces the process to four legible stages before directing people into deeper learning formats.

The current directory makes the broadened actor network visible through studio locations and collaboration records.

The first semester focused on understanding the actor and the medium. The team created personas, studied lithography studios in different countries, compared how they teach and communicate, attended DOU openings, and used meetings and field observations to identify where newcomers lost context or confidence. That work established a direction centered on visibility, accessible language, and learning through several formats rather than one campaign.

When DOU chose not to continue the relationship, the project lost its original actor but not its evidence. We contacted more than 100 lithography studios around the world and established successful contact with over 10 of them through email and online meetings. Studios reviewed the concepts, discussed the decline of lithography education, and gave product-specific feedback. The change in stakeholders shifted the project from promoting one Ankara studio to supporting the wider lithography community.

The final response was not a single awareness artifact. It became four connected products, each designed for a different kind of learning: reading, playing, making, and discovering. The website serves as the connective layer, so people can enter through the format that suits them and continue into the rest of the system.

Three standalone learning products are presented as one connected onboarding path inside the hub.

Read and play

The Guidebook of Lithography translates history, terminology, materials, studio culture, and production workflows into a structured editorial reference. Master’s Press: 1890 turns the physical and chemical sequence into a tactile 2D simulation, using tool-based interactions and visible changes on the stone so players learn through decisions rather than passive instruction.

The guidebook acts as the system's structured reading and reference layer.

Master’s Press: 1890 on the live hub, positioned as the playable part of the learning system.

Make and connect

The Kitchen Litho Kit removes the press, limestone, and studio requirement while preserving the core grease-and-water principle through household-adjacent materials and a six-step process. The Litho Hub website connects all three products with an introduction to the process, digital product access, and a growing studio directory. I designed and developed this web layer as the project's public product system.

The kit creates a hands-on entry point without requiring a specialist studio.

A visual six-step guide supports independent use and classroom demonstration.

The capstone concluded with two physical and two digital outputs that work independently but share one educational direction. The Guidebook of Lithography was prepared for print and digital reading, Master’s Press: 1890 reached a playable six-phase prototype, the Kitchen Litho Kit combined a reusable physical setup with digital instructions, and the Litho Hub website made the complete system accessible from one place.

The working hub now includes 43 lithography studios across six continents, including the original actor and international studios that contributed feedback or validation. This does not represent measured adoption by the community; it shows how the project moved from a single-studio brief to an extensible platform for documenting the craft, its learning tools, and the people sustaining it.

The hub frames education and studio visibility as parts of the same long-term system.

The public hub in its light editorial theme.

The same product system translated into its dark theme.