Art and Design Commons^™

Settling Dust, Unsettling Ground, Olivia Newroz

Masters Theses

Understanding dust as a material system that blurs the line between ground and atmosphere, I developed a dust machine as a tool for making dust legible at the human scale. While the blurriness of ground is visualized at both particle and planetary scales, at the human scale, it becomes less evident. Drawing from Lisa’s Moffitt’s discussion of “environmental models”–that is, models that don’t merely simulate phenomena, in this case dust, but rather produce the underlying force itself––I produced visualizations of how dust, as both a grounded and atmospheric element, intertwines ground and weather across scales, through a cyclical process of …

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 …

A Living Storyscape, Vivian Combariza

Masters Theses

Advocating for a transformative shift, the following proposes a new cultural setting that fosters diverse voices and dialogue, moving away from the singular narratives imposed by traditional curator-visitor dynamics. By drawing inspiration from nature's complexity and mirroring museums with ecosystems, the aim of this thesis is to emulate the adaptability and interconnectedness of natural ecosystems to develop flexible and inclusive environments, encouraging community engagement and shared learning experiences. This new design paradigm fosters a deeper connection with nature and other beings despite the physical separation. Embracing the collaboration and flexibility of nature, cultural institutions can regain relevance as vibrant centers …

Landing: Body, Site, Material, Renata Berta

Masters Theses

I believe that in order to build on the land, I must establish a profound relationship with it. As an outsider to New England territories, I actively seek this connection through immersive activities such as swimming, surfing, climbing, and extensive walks, immersing myself in the land to better understand it and synchronize with its rhythms. In my artistic and architectural practice, I explore dissolving traditional boundaries, emphasizing the vital return to the land to create a more responsive and embodied architecture that symbiotically engages with the landscape

Within this ongoing project, “Landing: Body, Site, Material,” I conceptualize my body not …

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 …

Repair Rolodex: Exchanges, Changes, And Patchwork Parables, Ethan Howard

Masters Theses

This book is an index of nine exchanges with strangers whom I met online through email Listservs or by word of mouth. In these transactions, I offered to repair broken things for a trade-in-kind payment. Through the brief relationship between owner and designer, each interaction suggests that an object is almost never entirely obsolete despite its perceived obsolescence.

At the core of these trades is a grassroots protest of the landfill and a critique of our global capitalist commerce system. The apparent desire for and nature of these trades demonstrates that stories make our objects meaningful. Each interplay studies peoples’ …

Homeward Bound: Moving Homes, Moving Home, Ella Nadeau

Masters Theses

The built environment has a powerful way of showing where our human attention and care is, a magic trick of emphasis and deemphasis. We proudly display our assets, wrapping them in light and gold while we shun the background people and places, choosing ubiquitous skins of plastic or brick in an effort to remove them from our visual language. Since we have had people we have had spaces to place them in but where some spaces relay the message that the person inside is a gift to the world, the majority chant a tired monotony of oppressive apathy: you do …

Beyond Display: Crafting Emotional Journeys For Belonging And Connectivity, Jiamin Yang

Masters Theses

In bustling urban areas like Manhattan, New York, the majority of interactions between individuals occur amidst the whirlwind of daily life. Yet, there is an absence of genuine connections within local communities, particularly among neighbors who are geographically close, creating a sense of detachment, untrusting, and anonymity. This thesis involves exploring innovative interventions with the ultimate goal of uncovering novel possibilities in interactive exhibitions, distinct from traditional displays. All of this is an effort to curate emotional journeys that transcend routine, fostering vibrant community belonging and connectivity. Against the backdrop of the city’s vertical living, where neighbor encounters are often …

Recomposing Museums: Designing Rhythmic Experiences For Short Attention Spans In The Digital Age, Yujiang Wu

Masters Theses

Learning, being the primary aspiration of museums, “is a byproduct of attention.”¹ A visitor’s ability to focus and sustain attention on the objects, narratives, and messages within the exhibition environment profoundly influences their overall experience and the educational impact of their visit.

In an era of rapid digital evolution, changes in how information is consumed and communicated have led to shorter attention spans. Traditional museums, which are rooted in continuous, linear storytelling, now face a need for adaptation. This thesis advocates for an innovative exhibition design approach tailored to the realities of shorter attention spans, proposing curatorial and design …

Emotional Factory, Yukun Cui

Masters Theses

该项目设想将上海一个历史悠久的仓库改造成一个创新的、以情感为主题的联合办公空间，超越传统的办公环境。在工作环境质量深刻影响生产力和幸福感的时代，该项目旨在创造一个协调身体、心理和情绪健康的空间。该设计融合了促进健康的元素，例如健身设施、美食和丰富的绿色植物，确保居住者在整个工作日中保持动力和灵感。该项目涉及个人与其环境之间的动态互动。认识到传统的办公室布局往往会限制移动和空间感知，我们的设计引入了一个固有的动态工作空间。灵活的布局，可调节的家具和可移动的隔板使空间能够适应各种活动和需求。互动元素和视觉刺激全天变化，鼓励探索和互动，而不需要持续的身体运动。使用不同的纹理、颜色和照明方案创造了一种多感官体验，使空间充满活力和不断变化的感觉。通过结合这些元素，该项目旨在重新定义现代工作空间，创造一个不仅能提高生产力，而且能丰富人类工作体验的环境。这种创新方法旨在为全球联合办公空间设定新标准，培养社区意识、创造力和幸福感。最终，该项目旨在创造一个开创性的环境，增强人类的工作体验，展示工作空间设计在广泛影响和改善情绪和心理健康方面的潜力。

Space Between: Navigating Openness, Torie Stotz

Masters Theses

In a predominantly human-made, constructed world, I am exploring how I can manifest the natural world with a hand made screen divider system, based on form and structure, that replicates that of a work of nature, more specifically simulating dappled light. Questioning sustainability through the limitations of terracotta clay, while introducing a passive, bioclimatic design, I explore how a fragile, rounded, hollow fired system impacts its structural integrity and its ability to embed nature like qualities in modular form. Clay is brittle when thin, dry, or water absorbing material is added; it absorbs water slowly, needs to be a certain …

Unconditioning Air, Weijia Deng

Masters Theses

Unconditioning Air rethinks the boundaries contrived through environmental control. For more than a century, HVAC (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning) defined the boundaries of interior air. The regime and tools of mechanical conditioning promise stability and manageability of indoor air quality at the expense of external phenomena, and by extension, any complexity or fluctuation in the environment. As a result, air conditioning premises that ideal interior comfort is “bubble-like”, requiring increasingly standardized and highly regimented regulatory tools. The plethora of patent drawings, duct specifications, and ASHRAE comfort codes produce an oppressively tightening grip over indoor air and comfort, rendering both …

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 …

Folding (And Unfolding): A Site-Responsive Strategy For Reusing Construction And Demolition Waste, Jennifer Ansley

Masters Theses

Discarding—in its most reductive formulation— is a sorting operation that makes distinctions between materials (as well as objects, people, communities, and landscapes) based on perceived value. In her book Waste of the World, Nicky Gregson, therefore, argues for a more careful collection-curation strategy that revalues and re-signifies “waste” to make it available for repair and reuse. Gregson, however, points to limited space and infrastructural capacity as a potential barrier to the development of new material handling strategies. My design responds by proposing a network of walls and paths that operate in each of the sites I’ve identified as an …

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, …

Making Room, Rachel Strompf

Masters Theses

Massachusetts is the only state in the United States with a right-to-shelter law which guarantees shelter for families with children and pregnant women.¹ As of February 2024, 3,500 homeless families with children are being sheltered in a motel or hotel with an average length of stay of 14 months, because traditional family shelters have reached capacity.^2,3 While these families are provided temporary shelter, these shelters do not allow for the development of a true sense of “home.” While a motel meets the needs of rudimentary shelter, motels were never designed as long-term accommodations and certainly not with a …

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.

Umbrales (Thresholds), Maureen Scally

Masters Theses

Umbrales is Spanish for Thresholds.

Thresholds are by nature ambivalent spaces, inviting two distinct realities into play. As an artist, I materialize my experiences as a migrant into an architectural form. A series of textile walls shape a space that is simultaneously interior and exterior so that the audience circulates in the negative space in between. It is in the construction of this threshold condition — a simultaneous placement, neither here nor there — that a complex narrative of place unfolds.

Outside_In, Zixuan Zhang

Masters Theses

In the post-COVID era, the importance of maintaining a connection with the external environment has become even more prominent. Outside_in is a series of ongoing installations located at the openings of modern buildings (spaces in between the interior and exterior) that can connect with or receive climatic resources such as wind, rainwater, sunlight, and more. Its purpose is to rethink and challenge how we can enhance the relationship with and awareness of climate and nature in our future indoor spaces through innovative experiential methods. This approach prioritizes the use of natural materials, supplemented by modern materials, and emphasizes the empathic …

Wild Joy: An Exploration In Queer Spatial Dynamics, Kipper Thomas Reinsmith

Masters Theses

What does it mean to feel represented in a space?

What does a trans space look like?

How can we queer our interior spaces?

Our world is crafted by the many designers that have come before us. These systems, products, and spaces are built upon assumptions of the bodies that will use and occupy them—namely cisgender, able-bodied, straight folks.

Designing and creating objects as a trans person is an act of radical nature. To take up space, to design for trans luxury, for the sake of beauty, for joy itself, feels counterintuitive to the narratives we’ve been served: that of …

Landscape De/Re-Construction Through Art, Manuel Gonzalez

Masters Theses

Contemporary landscape architecture practice and education primarily focus on ecological and technical interventions. The climate crisis we find ourselves in demands scientifically informed decisions and well-engineered execution of projects, but, more importantly, creativity and innovation.

The fine arts, which were once integral and foundational to design, are today largely unappreciated and appropriated. The spiritual power of Art, Aesthetics, and Beauty, explored at length through art history and theory, are often viewed as indulgent or secondary to execution. The gap between Art & Design has widened. As a result, designers face challenges in fostering in individuals the kind of care and …

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 …

Beyond The White Box: Building Alternative Art Spaces For The Black Community, Elijah Trice

Masters Theses

BASED ON THE SYSTEMIC BIASES AND LACK OF SUPPORT FOR BLACK ARTISTS & DESIGNERS IN THE PRIMARY ART MARKET, THIS STIGMA DISCOURAGES BLACK AND BROWN COMMUNITIES FROM PURSUING A CAREER IN THE CREATIVE ARTS. MY GOAL IS TO UNDERSTAND THE UNDERLYING ISSUES THAT CONTRIBUTE TO THIS DISPARITY, BY ANALYZING THE INFRASTRUCTURE OF BALTIMORE CITY AS A CASE STUDY.

Reintroducing Hemp (Rongony) In The Material Palette Of Madagascar: A Study On The Potential Of Hemp Clay Components And Its Impact On Social And Ecological Communities., Henintsoa Thierry Andrianambinina

Masters Theses

When mentioning the word hemp, especially in the local language of Madagascar, the literal translation does not set it apart from marijuana, as they are both called “rongony” - creating the stigma around hemp as the negative stereotype of marijuana. However, the material has been used by the ancestors of Madagascar, as well as across cultures, in its fibrous form to produce fabrication like textile goods and packaging. During colonization, the prohibition of hemp intensified, and since then, any activity related to either of these plants is prohibited and will end in severe punitive measures. This thesis explores the strengths …

Moving Narration: A Journey Through History, Yincheng Zhu

Masters Theses

The Central Pacific, as the first transcontinental railroad, is a remarkable achievement in the history of the United States. However, the story of what happened during its construction, including the struggles of the first generation of immigrants from China who built the tracks, and the resistance of native Americans to cede their lands, is largely forgotten. The California Zephyr, as a long-trip train that currently runs on the Central Pacific tracks, is not only a means of transportation but should also tell the history of survival and resistance embodied by the landscape it moves through and tracks it travels over. …

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 …

Spatial Reveries, Alexander Wenstrup

Masters Theses

We live in a hazy existence marked by rapid pace, development, digital consumption, and a deteriorating environment. Spatial Reveries hopes to counter the current trajectory and offer an alternative perspective by presenting one with moments of awe, discovery, and wonder to improve the disconnect between society and their surroundings. The work refers to a history of anamorphic art, cubism, deception, and optical phenomena in Western society. It operates on the urges and instincts of the artist, utilizing massing, light, transparency, horizons, and vastness, to challenge perceptions of space, time, and memory. Through the play of perspective and projection the work …

Cohabitation X Adaptation, 2100: A Climate Change Epoch, Kyle Andrews

Masters Theses

Some seventy-seven odd years in the future, the world as we know it will only be recognizable by those who are willing to accept it. The bustling metropolis of Boston Massachusetts has been transformed to appease the tides of Mother Nature as a consequence of human intervention. In the decades prior, humanity viciously fought to contain the effects of climate change, until many realized the colossal undertaking of such a battle. Municipalities across the globe had begun to accept that fighting the earth was no longer an option. Instead, the only hope forward was to adapt to a reality in …

Overlooked Modi Vivendi, Natalia Silva

Masters Theses

Traditional gender roles, performance of heterosexuality, marriage, parenthood, and a large variety of other societal expectations manifest themselves in the domestic realm, both intangibly and spatially. The design of domestic spaces has historically catered towards heteronormative living stereotypes, marginalizing people whose way of living challenges the norm. Even in the present day, designers with non-user clients — developers, investors, real estate firms, etc. — will design with heteronormative households in mind. The rise in feminist and LGBTQ+ rights movements has allowed for non-heteronormative modi vivendi (ways of living) to be more vocally and visibly present in the sociopolitical and cultural …

Manifesto Of Poor Images: Re-Imagine Guggenheim In The Post-Digital Age, Mengning He

Masters Theses

What is the role and value of low-resolution digital images, or "poor images," in a culture dominated by high-resolution and hyper-realistic digital media? This thesis investigates poor images from several perspectives: their technical characteristics, viewer’s experience, creative process, and artistic content.

With low-resolution as the defining characteristic of poor images, these pictures challenge the unceasing longing for ever-higher image resolution. While they seem unstable and untrustworthy, they challenge the obsession with higher resolution, offer an ambiguous visual experience, and provoke nostalgia. Poor images are open to appropriation, allowing users to become editors and co-authors. In the process of image-making, poor …