Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
- Institution
- Keyword
-
- Graphic design (76)
- Product design (64)
- Painting (53)
- Memory (37)
- Sculpture (36)
-
- Furniture design (35)
- Printmaking (30)
- Materials (28)
- Typography (23)
- Visual communication (23)
- Textile design (21)
- Ceramics (19)
- Jewelry design (19)
- Video art (19)
- Glass (18)
- Art - philosophy (17)
- Book design (17)
- Ceramic sculpture (17)
- Identity (17)
- Installation art (17)
- Performance (16)
- Nature (15)
- Art (13)
- Digital media (13)
- Body (12)
- Weaving (12)
- Graphic arts (10)
- Layout design (10)
- Technology (10)
- Process (9)
Articles 1 - 30 of 730
Full-Text Articles in Entire DC Network
Function Follows Material, Pablo Ejarque González
Function Follows Material, Pablo Ejarque González
Masters Theses
Dear Designer,
How often do we find ourselves lost in the design process, unsure of the next steps? It’s tempting to view every aspect of design as a problem needing a solution. However, function is not a problem. For a long time, I approached design from a problem-solving perspective, treating material as a secondary consideration after the idea had already formed. This approach needed to change.
This book is a journey—a map of material exploration. It is an embrace of experimentation and innate curiosity. Many of the experiments conducted did not culminate in finished furniture pieces, yet this does not …
Untitled, Lucia Steele
Lost Stories, Yuxuan Huang
Lost Stories, Yuxuan Huang
Masters Theses
The owner of the laundromat by the corner of my temporarily sublet room in New York once told me his life story randomly on the last day I went to dry my bedding. We had never spoken before because we both weren't sure if the other spoke Mandarin.
It’s a long and intricate one, so long and intricate that he could write his own book and become the protagonist of a realist novel. If one word could describe this world and the life we all live, it should be “Wuchang.” According to various authoritative Chinese-to-English dictionaries, it could mean unpredictable, …
Unfurling Blue Carpet Memories, Sara Ahli
Unfurling Blue Carpet Memories, Sara Ahli
Masters Theses
Glass is an amorphous solid, existing in a liminal space, embodying indeterminacy. Its states of transformation from viscous flow to structural solidity carry the imprints of bodily influence. With the direct intention of using glass as a conduit to explore materiality, memory, and self-awareness, I construct a language of embodiment that arises through a series of performative encounters between my physicality and glass in the hot shop.
The mediating process I employ to create and arrive at the glass artwork I make is as necessary as its final form. Motivated by the desire to claim agency over my personal narrative, …
Creative Connections: Building Empathy To Foster Ecoliteracy Through Art Education, Jocelyn Salim
Creative Connections: Building Empathy To Foster Ecoliteracy Through Art Education, Jocelyn Salim
Masters Theses
This thesis investigates the potential positive impact of fostering empathy and understanding for the natural world through art education. Through action research, this study examines various teaching approaches, such as incorporating scientific knowledge, employing literature to discuss ecological themes, and engaging in participatory storytelling activities to cultivate empathy among elementary school children. The objective of this thesis is to explore empathy as a potential pathway to encourage children to foster connections with the natural world and develop compassionate traits, attitudes, and behaviors towards nature as they grow. The findings of this study reveal that children exhibit high levels of enthusiasm …
Half Dawn, Catherine Ashley
Half Dawn, Catherine Ashley
Masters Theses
By presenting these words on paper, I have given entry into a microcosm of recent research, questions, and creative explorations. There is potential for disconnection when trying to turn your head inside out and present it in a way that feels beautiful for other people. I’m trusting the moments of authenticity I’ve found in my wandering. Segue. Relationship. Gesture. Illusion. My musings all stem from notions of temporality. Time dances on the farthest ends of both immensity and desolation. I’ve spent stretches of time asking the people, texts, and experiments around me to define time in a way that I …
Umbrella And Jellyfish, Yanran Bi
Umbrella And Jellyfish, Yanran Bi
Masters Theses
Rainy season arrives as soon as the summer begins in Shanghai. For some reason, I rarely remember to bring an umbrella with me. I have a lot of umbrellas, most of them are transparent ones bought at subway stations. When it suddenly starts pouring rain, umbrella vendors in Shanghai gather at each crowded exit of the subway sta- tions to sell umbrellas to people like me. The cheapest umbrellas they have are always the transparent ones. The whole city is turned upside down by the rain with its reflections on every street. Then a transparent umbrella opens up, then another, …
Lucid Dream: Embracing Uncertainty, Zhiyun Zhang
Lucid Dream: Embracing Uncertainty, Zhiyun Zhang
Masters Theses
Glass is a tool, a projection surface, a medium for optical phenomena. It creates a tangible link between physical space and perception, transcending the physical realm to reshape our sensory perceptions and resonate within our psyche, deepening our understanding. Inspired by cosmic and natural phenomena, my installations narrate the contemplation of the moon and the appreciation of rainbows. They reference historic optical technologies, incorporating glass, mirrors, light, darkness, and space to produce an encounter that extends beyond personal experience, resonating with our collective unconscious, uniting us in profound ways. The blurred boundaries between observer and observed, reality and illusion, sensory …
Modern Times, Will Beattie
Modern Times, Will Beattie
Masters Theses
At the intersection of glass, photography and sound lies issues of perspective, framing, and information. These factors as well as the conceptual space between object and image offer an opportunity to explore the way we register narrative through contradicting signifiers. Glass historically has been used as an instrument to reveal spaces, moments, and phenomena previously imperceptible to the human eye. This rendering of previously unseen spaces through language, technology or vision, may work to reorient the viewers’ perspective and allow for a new understanding of the world. The power of disruption as a potential catalyst is central to my studio …
Snowstorm, Caleb Shafer
Snowstorm, Caleb Shafer
Masters Theses
This thesis explores the connection between memory and place-building, focusing on how personal narratives and physical models compress details to reveal their core essence. Memories serve as a bridge between time and space, allowing for a non-linear experience of time and offering a unique perspective on the existence and transformation of places. Although this compression involves some loss, it generates new narratives and insights into life while examining the power structures and cultural systems inherent in representation.
Entre Manos Y Barro: Innovando Con Tradición, Jose Mata
Entre Manos Y Barro: Innovando Con Tradición, Jose Mata
Masters Theses
"Entre Manos y Barro: Innovando con Tradicion'' (Between Hands and Clay: Traditional Innovation) dives into sustainable and ethical innovations of traditional Zapotec ceramics. It discusses how introducing thoughtfully designed tools, like a specialized caja humeda (wet box), can enhance artisans' workspaces while preserving the cultural essence of their craft. This initiative emphasizes innovations that honor traditional methods and focus on community involvement.
The thesis is grounded in the principles of ethical innovation, which emphasize respect for traditional techniques, community participation in the innovation process, and the sustainability of both the craft and the environment. These principles shape the development of …
Threading With Hair // Intertwined Stories, Cloris Ding
Threading With Hair // Intertwined Stories, Cloris Ding
Masters Theses
“Threading with Hair // Intertwined Stories” is a poignant exploration that navigates the nuanced landscape of women's growth and identity recognition amidst biased societal influences, tracing the trajectory from the artist’s mother's generation to her own. Through a deeply personal lens, the thesis transcends individual narratives to articulate some shared female experiences. Employing reflective works in the form of jewelry, objects and writings, the study delves into female-centric topics, including the fluidity of identity, the transformative journey through various life stages, and the profound impact of societal expectations and family heritage. At the heart of this exploration is the metaphorical …
Going To The Sea, Lingyi Kong
Going To The Sea, Lingyi Kong
Masters Theses
“Good-bye Icarus” is a work that aims to blend art, history, and environmental exploration through illustration, an interactive graphic novel, visual documentation, and programming language narratives.
A year of coastal life in Rhode Island has provided me with endless inspiration in terms of design language. I’ve ventured into blending dynamic visuals from TouchDesigner with illustration, a pioneering approach as far as I’m aware.
My narrative is based on seaside scenery and mythology metaphorical elements, making image programming to capture the essence of waves a focal point and central experiment of my work. Furthermore, after crafting a dynamic design visual language, …
The Future Is Over, Dotan Appelbaum
The Future Is Over, Dotan Appelbaum
Masters Theses
History is constructed out of the narratives by which we organize the substance of all that has ever happened. Our understanding of the contemporary moment is determined by how we shape our history. The future is a promise that emerges from how we contextualize our place in time.
This thesis starts by acknowledging that the futurity promised by enlightenment liberalism is inconceivable in the face of contemporary horrors and climate catastrophe. Given this reality, what are we doing as designers? With a Benjaminian understanding of and a Foucauldian approach to history, this thesis constructs a history of design that follows …
From Here To The Ground, Courtney Mccracken
From Here To The Ground, Courtney Mccracken
Masters Theses
Art, for me, is a thinking process. It is also a process of connection to body and place. It directs my fractured attention toward the things I care about. As I labor through process, I am gifted with a moment of attentiveness. In a time where everything feels urgent, and our perspective can be warped by the endless flood of information, making art is a chance to stop, to think, and to feel.
It is a space for holding, and a space for being held.
Recently, I have been working primarily in animation and sound design, experimenting widely across media …
Here—There, Glikeriya Shotanova
Here—There, Glikeriya Shotanova
Masters Theses
Here—there explores the nature and ways of gathering, proposing an alternative path to organizing a cultural center. Divided into three acts (Act One: There, Act Two: Here, and Act Three: Together), it touches on the topics of collective knowledge and the importance of its accessibility to the local communities. How do we organize communities in a way that operates as a body, and how do we use industrial spaces as a bridge between knowledge and those who carry the knowledge? Due to alienation in societies, the decentralization of creative communities, and the inaccessibility of real estate to younger generations, there …
Call And Response : Experiments In Storytelling, Deanne Fernandes
Call And Response : Experiments In Storytelling, Deanne Fernandes
Masters Theses
Being part of RISD's inaugural Masters of Illustration cohort has been an immense honor. This journey has been nothing short of transformative and healing, as it has allowed me to unearth layers of self-discovery through my creative practice.
In my thesis, I introduce a fresh research methodology rooted in the principles of call and response, with adaptability, creativity, and storytelling as its foundational pillars. Through the lenses of visual storytelling, experimental animation, graphic journalism, and fictional world-building, I demonstrate how these techniques can effectively bridge the gap between theory and practice. This dynamic approach fosters meaningful connections among diverse perspectives …
America, Dreaming., Sarah Meftah
America, Dreaming., Sarah Meftah
Masters Theses
There is a version
of America
that exists
only in dreams,
a kind of folklore,
shrouded in images,
technicolor interiors,
wrapped in plastic,
ghosts of recent past
to haunt and guide;
a constant reminder.
Wishful thinking
a constructed imaginary,
one I can hold in my hand.
Popular culture and spectacle, America and the domestic ideal, capitalism and the collective unconscious of a national identity. As an artist, I am interested in the myriad images that manifest for a viewer when they think of the spectacle of American pop culture, its domestic archetypes, and the material worship it revolves around. My …
This Is For You: A Handbook For Design Students, Gabriel Drozdov
This Is For You: A Handbook For Design Students, Gabriel Drozdov
Masters Theses
This Is For You is a handbook for design students. It is a collection of stories, projects, and conversations on the subjects of design, code, and teaching. The book’s first part, “Learning,” contains stories about the experiences that shaped me as a designer. The second part, “Making,” summarizes the projects that taught me how to design. The third and final part, “Sharing,” is a series of conversations with the people that helped me along the way. In collecting and publishing these resources, This Is For You is an attempt to create an open-source example of what a career in design …
Urban Looms, Recoloring City, Ella Son
Urban Looms, Recoloring City, Ella Son
Masters Theses
The metropolis has been a dominant and defining aspect of my life. Acutely aware of visual illusions created by the choreographed and unchoreographed movements of people in the streets and the distortions of light and shadow on the glass facades of skyscrapers, I reinterpret the patterns and colors that are in constant interplay into a collection of architectural textiles.
With an emphasis on optical layering, these immersive installations recreate the quality of being spellbound in the city. Scaled to emphasize verticality and activated through transparent overlays and dense color interplay, a rich visual field is activated. In their application, the …
I Am Becoming., Dai Asano
I Am Becoming., Dai Asano
Masters Theses
This is a collection of essays documenting my grappling with the idea that time is always in motion. When you say now, it is not now anymore, but we are still in now, a new now. How can I stay in the now without being swept away by the current of time? Describing a film by Ozu Yasujiro, Deleuze writes, “The vase in Late Spring is interposed between the daughter’s half smile and the beginning of her tears. There is becoming, change, passage. But the form of what changes does not itself change does not pass on. This is time, …
Memory And Experiential Lab, Yufan Xu
Memory And Experiential Lab, Yufan Xu
Masters Theses
In the tapestry of our lives, there exist moments and places that we can never revisit, scenes etched into our memories that fade with the passage of time. These experiences and memories are treasures, provide us with an anchor to our past. Unfortunately, many of these moments are like fireflies in the night, here one moment and gone the next. Yet, they remain invaluable, forever etched in our hearts and minds. I wonder if it is possible to trigger cherished past experiences and memories in our daily lives, allowing individuals to re-experience similar moments, thereby nourishing the spiritual world. Therefore, …
Patchwork: 76km Between Juárez And El Paso, Naheyla Medina
Patchwork: 76km Between Juárez And El Paso, Naheyla Medina
Masters Theses
Located at the western edge of Texas where the Río Bravo ~ Rio Grande, becomes the border between México and the United States. Resides a spectacle of misconceptions that, along with an expansive corten steel border wall embedded into the earth, live to suppress the histories, culture, and environment entangled together like patchwork along this border space. The built environment influences our daily experiences, and our daily experiences can often influence our built environment. This project seeks to leverage, murals as a medium, creative writing, and architectural representations, to rework the mapping between Mexico and the US. Honing in on …
Embodied Abstractions: Identity And Representation In The Digital Era, Srikar Hari
Embodied Abstractions: Identity And Representation In The Digital Era, Srikar Hari
Masters Theses
The digital image is a copy in motion. As it accelerates, it deteriorates.
It is a ghost of an image, a preview, a thumbnail, squeezed through
digital connections, resized, uploaded, downloaded, reformatted
and re-edited.
- Adapted from “In defense of the Poor Image” by Hito Steryel
With today’s digital technology, the image is no longer a stable
representation of the world, but a programmable database that
is updated in real time. It is not only part of a program, but it
contains its own operating code: the image is a program in itself.
Consequently, the image’s rhetoric has taken on …
So Far So Good, Cooper Goldman
So Far So Good, Cooper Goldman
Masters Theses
What is the most beautiful object in the world?
The thick, heavy, white, porcelain diner mug.
Describe what you make…
Home goods and furniture. Crafted with attention to detail, with materials that you can feel good about.
Why do you make what you make?
Through the elevation of ordinary objects, we can elevate our daily routine.
On The Impulse To Notate, Lydia Chodosh
On The Impulse To Notate, Lydia Chodosh
Masters Theses
On the Impulse to Notate assembles an array of dialogic encounters. Composed in fragments — written and collected, designed and curated — this catalog resists linear narrative formulas to favor an open poetic syntax.
Here, the designer relies on her propensity to notate, aggregate, and persistently recompose.
She materializes language that promotes movement toward knowledge and craft in conversation.
She reads and translates stories spatially, frequently shifting their frames.
Soft Procedures, Alec Figuracion
Soft Procedures, Alec Figuracion
Masters Theses
Looking through the soft lens — from the vantage point of a place one calls home, and steered by an interiority that feels a little too much sometimes — I am interested in the hazy, undefined subjects and instances that occur around the peripheries of our lenses: fuzzy imprints of memories, shifting notions of home, and shapeless narratives. Working primarily with the moving image, I investigate the multiple threads that might exist between them, and persistently shift and adjust the focus ring on the camera lens so as to embrace and celebrate multiplicities, and our collective definitions of softness.
Surface Tension, Berett Wilber
Surface Tension, Berett Wilber
Masters Theses
Land is the premise upon which all questions of identity, belonging, and consciousness are set.
Our relationship to land is simple and complex. On one hand, in our daily experience there is no daylight between body and land. On the other hand, our relationship to land is intensely mediated through design in the form of tools, ritual, technology, tradition, and law. Language and design are primary mediums through which land is transformed into a material resource and commodity.
Understanding how designed systems craft our understanding of land can help us recognize their limits — and open our eyes to the …
To The Dogs Or Whoever, Jacqueline Walker
To The Dogs Or Whoever, Jacqueline Walker
Masters Theses
My creative process is inspired by the natural world and its inevitable conflict with humans. Through intricately layered screen prints, repurposed furniture, or reimagined animal hides, I craft narratives depicting the complex interactions between animals and humans, examining their conflict and the ensuing consequences. I weave layers of information and symbolism from natural history, behavioral ecology, music, and personal experience into each piece. This thesis explores my artistic practice, discussing its underlying values, and examining the influences and stories behind each piece. Focusing on the narrative of the animal, my body of work strives to cultivate empathy towards them and …
Variations On Noise, Clinton Van Arnam
Variations On Noise, Clinton Van Arnam
Masters Theses
Variations on Noise is a three-part collection: an index, a set of interviews, and a perspective on a working practice in graphic design and sound.
If noise is ubiquitous in our everyday lives, how do we define it and use it as a catalyst for dissonance and change? As a designer, I use noise algorithms to generate pseudo randomness and break up repetitive textures. As a musician, I use noise to create scores and performances that challenge our perception of what is comfortable and uncomfortable.
Seven interviews with designers, artists, musicians, and a Tibetan monk offer ways to approach the …