Digital Commons Network^™

Graphic Warmline, Soo Min Lee

Masters Theses

Graphic Warmline is a metaphorical helpline for designers.It is a safe space to embrace doubt, navigate the complexities of our surroundings, and to move and adapt in new ways through the design process. Born from my own struggles, and ongoing processes of active-listening, observing, and introspection, this warmline is an invitation to contemplate and reframe standards of perfection and ingrained habits in order to discover genuine joy, a true voice, and to embrace flexibility, openness, and dynamism while designing.

Graphic Warmline offers interactive experimental methods, materials, and formats through actions of interplay in freeform.These experimentations revolve around threads of interplaying …

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 …

Capture, Control, Circulate : Can We Queer Regulatory Power In Graphic Design?, Adie Fein

Masters Theses

Capture, Control, Circulate addresses regulatory power, the transmission and enforcement of culturally-sanctioned behaviors and identity. How does regulatory power operate in graphic design and what—if anything—can the graphic designer do to subvert that operation? The methodologies for subversion explored in this book typically draw from queer and trans* experience and thought. Therefore, the work herein takes up issues of identity, normativity, marginalization, and community.

This thesis also considers design education, and its contemporary emphasis on the capture and control of content. It advocates instead for an educational model that centers circulation; that is, graphic design’s capacity to platform, to publish, …

Community, Harana & Karaoke: Towards A Theatrical Design, Ryan Diaz

Masters Theses

Community, Harana, & Karaoke: Towards a Theatrical Design explores graphic design’s potential as theatrical staging for building community and practicing the difficult and complicated art of loving others through performance.

Studying graphic design as harana, the traditional Filipino custom of romantic serenade, offers a framework to view both mediums as social architectures that propose and transform proximities of relation between people. As in harana, graphic design facilitates in naming, grounding, and organizing social relationships; in taking these affective environments as content and form, both arts align with the nature of performance and staging. Through practice, research, and abstraction, the graphic …