Graphic Design Commons^™

Moving In, Moving Up, Moving On : The Adaptation And Preservation Of Chinese Diasporas Through Food, Jieqi Yao

Masters Theses

Moving In, Moving Up, Moving On explores the processes of Chinese culture and space in America of adaptation, assimilation, and preservation that underlie food changes. As Chinatowns across the US have evolved and residents have relocated, former centers of Chinese cultural identity have progressively transformed into restaurant districts with increasingly diverse populations and space gentrification.

The thesis argues that food is central to preserving cultural memory and reducing the generation divide. In the context of the Chinese diaspora transformation, culture has changed food in different spaces, and it gives people more choices to acquire and exchange information and values through …

Writ In Water, Jack Tufts

Masters Theses

This thesis celebrates impermanence; that all things are transitory, in a perpetual state of flux. Yet the idea of place is a perception that endures; it is what we carry with us.

Here lies this thesis, Writ In Water.

On the surface, there is a layer of impermanence: fragments dispersed, dissolved memories, words washed away. Water is a medium for memory, carrying the ephemeral debris on the surface. I take what the water gives me, reaching in to pull out the remains to build a home, for wherever the water takes me. I gather fragments as a form of …

Connective Movements, Ian Keliher

Masters Theses

Connective Movements describes the winding, associative thoughts gathered from long conversations with colleagues and internal dialogue with writers, philosophers, and filmmakers. Using the visual essay, I follow points of interest through labyrinthine and idiosyncratic logics. Collage and montage results in an assemblage of visual ideas both analytic and personal. Although the outputs vary, my body of work has been informed by a sustained inquiry into moving image with a focus on small moments and subjectivity: cloudwatching can spin into thoughts on communication, or simple, everyday words burrow into experience and memory. With this aim, I use the constituent parts of …

Crossover Logics, Serena Ho

Masters Theses

As more and more of modern life is measured and calculated by computational machines, our realities are flattened into streams of data, bits, and binary. As a graphic designer operating under societal and technological systems that unrelentingly speed up, simplify, and reduce the individual into a digital form legible to machines, my response to these conditions is to search for moments of imagination, poetry, and play within these structures. In my practice, I pair machined forms with human gestures to bridge the duality between computer and human logics, the rational and the emotional, and the measurable and unmeasurable aspects of …

Food, Drink, Time, New Year And Cloth, Jian Li

Masters Theses

My project uses traditional Chinese calligraphy culture and my own family stories to create five daily use products to help my user find a sense of belonging to Chinese culture and also introduce my culture and stories to all audiences.

As an international student who came to the US, I have often struggled with a lack of cultural identity and belonging. This is a common issue faced by many who choose to leave their homes and venture to new places. However, I believe that we can overcome this by creating products that generate an emotional connection with their users.

Making Then Meaning, Ben Denzer

Masters Theses

This is an artist talk contained within a book. It is 816 pages and 49 minutes long. Closed captions run across the spreads. A video of this talk can be watched on bendenzer.com/making-then-meaning

At RISD, I’ve been prompted to expand the scope and tools of my practice and to reflect on questions of meaning in my work.

I spend my days making things, but I’ve never really had good answers to questions of why I make the things I make, or what their meaning is. I don’t think there are simple answers to these questions.

I think meaning comes from …

Press Play, Karan Kumar

Masters Theses

"Press Play" arises from a conviction that a predilection to play is not an infantile diversion; instead, it extends our human ability to magnify, augment and shape reality. This thesis moves through different sites —all metaphorical playgrounds— where cultural repertoires are altered, negotiated, and invented through play. Each playground is a laboratory for innovation and a catalyst for developing a mental aptitude for reimagining ways to occupy familiar structures: the slide, swing, carousel, jungle gym, and bench as navigational spaces. The thesis becomes an experiential landscape through situations, processes, methods, and stylistic movements.

Moving At The Speed Of Trust, Sun Ho Lee

Masters Theses

Moving at the Speed of Trust is a workbook of strategies — practices, definitions, and techniques — to nurture community-building in support of inbetweeners who live between power structures and cultures and are often left out. Inbetweeners are those individuals whose lives are in transition through recent immigration or forced translocation from Asia to America.

These strategies revolve around threads of trust: kin, giggles, vulnerability, and shared experience. With these threads, we can question power. We can preserve stories, expand the ways we connect, shift perspectives on what is “standard,” and cultivate a community rooted in understanding. To understand each …

Otherworldly Gestures, Sadia Quddus

Masters Theses

OtherWorldly Gestures seeks to give form to the intangible. I work primarily with light as material substance to shape a speculative emotive space in which I make metaphysical phenomena experiential. I collaborate with ecological and technological elements to express a spiritual understanding of Self and World. Most recently, the work translates material objects and architectural elements from my cultural heritage, and gives visual and haptic form to the sacred relationship between body, soul, and natural world.

Through these explorations, I begin to propose a speculative OtherWorld. I delve into the precolonial, ancestral teachings of a mystical spiritual path, referencing Sufi …

Making Time: Gentle Invitations For Radical Slowness, Lian Fumerton-Liu

Masters Theses

Year after year, we place more value on efficiency and productivity; underestimating smaller gestures of craft, care and wonder. This emphasis directly affects the tools and structures that determine how, and what, we make.

Making time is a practice that counters the urgency of now by unearthing approaches to break down, reimagine, and remake existing systems. Through personal reflection and experimental collaboration, it acts as a series of ever-evolving invitations—openings and pauses for others to begin to radically invert expectations; to wander; to grow artifacts; to write letters to the birds; to multiply oceans; to extend connections; to plant proposals; …

Surfacing: A (Loose) Manual On Unlayering / Stuff-Making And Hypervisibility, Zoë Pulley

Masters Theses

This is a (loose) manual on a method I like to refer to as surfacing.

A method that synthesizes narrative through the use of surfaces such as textiles, paper, web & video to reveal the spectacularly ordinary parts of Black life within a growing design practice.

A method I (currently) practice in three (evolving) steps:

Unlayering and piecing together stuff (rememory)

Acknowledgment of ancestry through stuff-making (kin)

Consciousness of oneself and the place / time / space in which the work is being disseminated (hypervisibility)

This is a manual that profiles a (current) design practice of a Black female maker …

Searching For New Landscapes, Halim Lee

Masters Theses

“Searching for New Landscapes” ventures beyond familiar environments to explore new territories in graphic design.

By changing our environment and patterns, looking at things anew with a fresh perspective, and transforming the tools we use, we can spark new insights and catalyze evolution for growth.

This study proposes getting away from known environments and breaking existing habits by responding instinctively and rapidly to unexpected prompts.

The collected works and writing underpin the importance of thinking flexibly with a lighthearted “why not?” attitude and looking at things beyond existing definitions.

These methodologies are further applied to the action of teaching, to …

Liquid Border, Yingfan Jia

Masters Theses

A River is a mighty and constantly-evolving force, leaving behind an intricately designed and constantly changing system. Not just a river, the Rio Grande stretches all the way from Colorado before intersecting with the US-Mexico Border in southern Texas - a point where the powerful forces of nature now merge with a clearly-defined political boundary. The outcome of this is a unique ecological niche, which may often go unnoticed despite its distinctiveness.

Texas is famous for its farms and ranches, and the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas was once an agricultural hub. However, urbanization and the depletion of water …

Form Follows Feeling Follows Form, Harshal Duddalwar

Masters Theses

In this thesis, I explore ways of expression at the intersection of form, feeling, and storytelling; through my lived experiences. I emphasize the act of documentation, encouraging introspection and reflection as a means of creating a body of personal work. I also talk about developing my visual vocabulary and language to express these narratives, along with strategies and plans for making personal work outwardly visible.

Superbland, Dougal Henken

Masters Theses

"A thin wafer is placed in the mouth of a kneeling woman and becomes flesh. A man masturbates quietly in a darkened room to a 3D model of a popular film actress. A car drives through an abandoned town and decelerates as it approaches a sign reading “Slow Children Playing.” A man fastidiously mows an artificial lawn while watching the sun dip low over a vast desert horizon. Superbland opens up new paths in understanding graphic design within the realm of the hyperreal. It begins with a study of simulation in graphic design contexts, building upon established forms of meaning-making …

A Part Apart, Spenser Atlas

Masters Theses

I am fascinated by connections. Things that click, snap, slide, and hold. I care about the ways in which objects meet, looking for answers in the space between. What binds one thing to another?

I believe the world is presented to us in pieces. It’s hard to say how it all comes together. It's easy to believe things are shapeless and detached from each other. Connection is a bridge, a way of linking one thing to another that reveals interdependence, and eventually moves outwards to express a correlation between pieces, once assumed to be discrete and isolated.

This work is …

Invisible Systems, Mina Kim

Masters Theses

We are immersed in an efficiency-and-profit-obsessed world where products are advancing for the sake of updates without meaningful outcomes. The products’ seemingly simple and seamless interfaces bear the marks of deception and promote the world’s obsessions as a norm. My work defines the visual language and methods that hide complex truth within invisible systems. I aim to strike through invisibility for greater transparency and visibility.

I employ techniques that dis-organize the guidelines and components of invisible systems, reframing expectations and opening up new ways of understanding our surroundings. I intend whimsical reconfigurations to act as a mirror, providing a moment …

Particular Proceedings, Ingrid Schmaedecke

Masters Theses

Particular Proceedings is the outcome of an ongoing quest to understand the origins and motivations of my creative process as a designer.

By continuously pairing early influences and experiences — such as architecture and woodworking — with recurring interests, I gather a view of my methods and, with that, a reframing of my affinity for designing: an intimate relation between material, maker, and content, with meaning often arising out of that process.

In this thesis, I demonstrate, through projects, conversations, and essays, how this relation operates in different scenarios and through different lenses of inquiry. I alternate perspectives, repurpose ordinary …

Infinitely Incredible Configurations, Jenni Oughton

Masters Theses

As a designer, I am intent on charting out a radically different perspective on the future. To instigate movement beyond current design thinking centered on problem solving, I propose a shift toward design fiction—a deliberate and direct inquiry into the realm where design meets science fiction, and how that merges with reality. My practice uses science, speculative fiction, and technology as positive models to both generate prompts and spur design outcomes. I borrow from the author Isaac Asimov's three categories of science fiction narratives to instigate a way of structuring this design endeavor: What if ..., If only ..., If …

Access In Ambiguity, Moritz Lónyay

Masters Theses

The wealth of color present in nature has long been a major source of inspiration for works of art and design. Yet as more species become extinct due to habitat loss, climate change and unchecked hunting, will we face a less colorful, more monotonous future? How will this impact art and design and how could either be utilized as tools to counteract the loss of color? This thesis speculates upon such a future by the sixth wave of mass extinction and instigates a movement that celebrates color. Growing up in the Anthropocene, the first geological epoch in which human existence …