Art and Design Commons^™

You, Me, And The Unknown: A Creative Exploration Into The Emotions We Feel About What We Don't Understand, Lena Hall

University Honors Theses

I've always found the concept of fear and anxiety to be incredibly fascinating. As someone who grew up with extreme anxiety, I always wanted to rationalize it and figure out exactly why I felt that way. Anxiety is the inherent fear of the unknown and I wanted to know more about why we fear what we don't understand, or in other cases, why we love it. I conducted a research project on our perceptions of the unknown that resulted in an experimental page layout print publication where I shared the participant's views on the unknown through a visual storytelling medium.

Endless Form, Kaela Kennedy

Masters Theses

Endless Form is a gentle argument for a practice rooted in embodied seeing and communicating. It invites the reader through multiple actions of visual and linguistic perception – observation, seeing, and attention – and examines how these methods operate to widen our fields of understanding to more empathetically engage with the world as an ecological whole. It claims that graphic design, as a practice built on the relationship between visual form and language, has a unique ability to translate the unending feedback loop between the eye, the seen, and the language we use to define it. It argues for ways …

Perform—Produce, Rebecca Wilkinson

Masters Theses

Perform — Produce defines graphic design as a discipline rooted in work rather than a process that springs forth spontaneously from the creative imagination.

Perform — Produce is driven by strict constraints and machine-like craft, employing outdated tools and the physical body in processes of making that are stubbornly slow.

Perform — Produce deploys performance as a tactic to expose the otherwise invisible labor of design, and to reveal the ways design acquires value.

Perform — Produce proposes a new organizational model that integrates live happenings, cross-disciplinary exchange, and self-publishing to consider not just the product of design but also …

Dimensional Dialogues, Farida Abousteit

Masters Theses

Dimensional Dialogues, a multi-installation series, offers us a place to interact with language in a way that is whimsical and transcends our need to understand and comprehend language. We remove the tensions of language barriers by finding beauty and personal connection to typography, now scaled up to a human scale and reacting in real time to our movements. A process begins from ancient practices of designing Arabic Calligraphy, to creating Graphic Outputs of that calligraphy, to technologically heavy and new works in creating 3D models of these works that can be projected and respond to human movement. These installations, in …

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 …

Expanding Learn By Doing: Creating A Culture Of Extracurricular Lab Work In The Graphic Communication Department, Miriam Gabai, Isis Dominguez

Graphic Communication

The existing Graphic Communication (GrC) curriculum immerses students in print production through hands-on labs, exposing them to a variety of industrial machinery.

However, outside the context of required labs, students will rarely use the department’s equipment, which is a lost learning opportunity.

This project proposes exploring opportunities for students to use machinery outside the context of required classes, in order to both foster familiarity with industry tools and generate new industry knowledge. The aim is to research and develop a plan for implementing a program that helps to encourage students to further develop skills and pursue research projects using department …

High Frequency: A Graphic Anthology Of Music, Cindy Nguyen

Graphic Communication

High Frequency experiments with the production of both non-traditional book design and graphic design in order to explore the personal relationship that can exist between an individual and music. Key areas of experimentation lie in typography, graphic design, and layout in order to result in a specialized, hand-crafted book featuring custom posters of twenty-five albums that have had particular significance to my personal musical journey. How can one visually represent their emotional connection, journey, and relationship to a body of music? Though this is the primary focus of this project, a secondary goal is to explore how an individual interacts …

Touch By Angels Café Rebrand, Hailey Choi

Graphic Communication

Touch By Angels, a local Korean-dessert café in San Luis Obispo, CA, specializing in bingsoo, taiyaki, and specialty teas, has struggled since its December 2023 opening to establish a cohesive visual identity across its B2C interaction spaces, including its website, social media pages, and on-site signage. This rebranding project aims to develop a comprehensive visual identity for Touch By Angels by enhancing its logo design, color palette, typography, and photography, revamping its social media, and on-site signage to create a unified and appealing brand image. The expected outcome is improved customer engagement, enhanced brand recognition, and business growth, positioning Touch …

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 …

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 …

Asili, Husna Abubakar

Masters Theses

ASILI is a Swahili word meaning ORIGIN, SOURCE, and ESSENCE. It can also mean the fundamental principal of a culture. It is not cognitive, it is metaphysical.

The work that I do explores the preconceptual, prespatial and pretemporal organization of culture, specifically African culture and even more specifically, Swahili culture.

I use multiple techniques to interpolate a visual voice to an othered people both continental and abroad. I explore the mythoform that connects the mystical and dive into what of it that becomes a practice within Swahili culture. I take experience from my life as a Swahili woman, from the …

Never Real Historians, Emily Bluedorn

Masters Theses

Never Real Historians is a graphic inquiry into how surfacing hidden histories can lead to a liberatory and layered design practice. It is both a record of my process and a template for future making and future ancestors. Mining inheritance can be an ambiguously murky territory, full of contradictions, collisions, and tension between the past and present. My hope is that this thesis functions as a model of navigating that terrain, by interacting with storied objects and ephemera, in order to revive forgotten and marginalized histories. By re-examining my own shared and personal inheritances, as an American woman designer living …

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 …

Life Of Things, Things Of Life, Shiyue Wang

Masters Theses

In a world often captivated by the grand and explicit, my thesis, Life of Things, Things of Life explores the quiet yet profound narratives hidden within everyday objects. Drawing on my background in data design, I adopt a methodology that intertwines subjective narrative with rational analysis and challenges traditional hierarchies of value. Through processes of observation, collection, archiving, and re-contextualization, I elevate what is often overlooked as mundane and fleeting. This thesis not only uncovers the narrative potential of ordinary objects but also repositions them as protagonists in their own right, urging viewers to reconsider their conventional roles not as …

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, …

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.

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 …

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.

Graphic Desire, Michelle Belgrod

Masters Theses

Before I knew about design, I knew about desire. A desire for the new, the beautiful, the promising. A desire that lives on a surplus of surfaces. On packaging, social media, on websites. A desire that makes the job of a graphic designer an object of desire itself. A practice that prioritizes aesthetics over meaning. Expectations over reality.

In Graphic Desire, I complicate the ways that desire affects both designers and consumers. Caught up in our own need for creative fulfillment, we often overlook our impact as the arbiters of desire. Under capitalism, we create work that over-promises a …

Industrial Tenderness, Elbert Girón

Masters Theses

Industrial Tenderness surveys the relationship between visual language, cultural expression, and diasporic practices through the design of functional sculptures. These designed objects seek to communicate cultural legibility, or intuitive cultural belonging, to Mexican-American peoples by challenging legacy notions of design language. Through a proposed design language framework and designed objects, Industrial Tenderness seeks to affirm a pluriversal practice of industrial design.

Legacy industrial design confines design language to a heavily prescriptive canon, resulting in a stark monocultural language that is unrepresentative of perspectives outside of a legacy dominant white eurocentricity founded in thinking from the Bauhaus and Ulm schools. Through …

Snapbot - The Enhanced Physical Play, Morong Li

Masters Theses

Snapbot is a building toy set. It investigates the integration of physical and digital mediums within the realm of play, addressing the dominance of video games in children’s entertainment. By merging Morong’s interests in toys, design, and psychology, this project aims to balance different play mediums to offer combined benefits without diminishing each one’s value.

To address screen time’s dominance, I developed a toy concept for 11- to 13-year-olds that merges physical and digital play. This concept allows for the physical construction of robotic toys that, when transferred to a digital environment, come alive and tackle digital challenges. In this …

Human Or Machine: The Effects Of Centering Productivity On User Psyche Through Digital Management/Tracking Tools, Pema Thangzur

University Honors Theses

This paper examines the growing toxic culture of centering productivity and efficiency in the growth of Big Data-incentivized digital management/tracking tools. In response to the development of personal notetaking tools, mood tracker apps, habit tracking, and other personal data tracking programs, discourse from data scientists, interactive designers, archivists, and technology academics have critiqued how well-meaning the larger tech industry is by providing these tools. However, the current discourse on developing potential solutions to this issue remains understudied as the growth of said tools are fairly new. This paper proposes that digital interfaces employ approaches with users' personal data that center …

Latent Auto-Recursive Composition Engine: A Generative System For Creative Expression In Human-Ai Collaboration, Yenkai Huang

Computer Science Senior Theses

This thesis investigates the shifting boundaries of art in the era of Generative AI, crit-
ically examining the essence of art and the legitimacy of AI-generated works. Despite
significant advancements in the quality and accessibility of art through generative
AI, such creations frequently encounter skepticism regarding their status as authentic
art. To address this skepticism, the study explores the role of creative agency in var-
ious generative AI workflows and introduces an ”artist-in-the-loop” system tailored
for image generation models like Stable Diffusion. This system aims to deepen the
artist’s engagement and understanding of the creative process. Additionally, a novel
tool, …

Echo: The 2.5d Bridge Between The 2d And 3d Virtual Reality Space, Emilie Nicole Hopkinson

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

In response to the expanding prevalence of virtual reality (VR) technology, there arises a necessity for beginner-friendly tools tailored towards individuals with little to no experience in creating art for VR, especially 2D artists. Echo serves as a user-friendly solution that enables primarily 2D artists with little to no experience in 3D editing and VR development to create 2.5D art by providing a simple 3D web editor and to share their VR artwork with a 6-digit share code. By facilitating these functions, Echo is a potential bridge for 2D artists to create art in the VR realm. This study assesses …

Manipulative, Dark, And Unethical Design Practices In Ui & Ux Design, Ryan Edward Brown

Honors Theses

This thesis examines the pervasive and detrimental effects of manipulative user interface and user experience design (UI/UX) practices on individuals and society. Focusing on three critical areas – accessibility, dark patterns, and polarization – the study employs a mixed-methods approach, combining findings from a comprehensive literature review, an analysis of specific design patterns and methods, and a survey of user experiences.
The literature review covers topics such as the importance of accessibility in design education, the prevalence of dark patterns in mobile and desktop sites, the role of personalization algorithms in shaping user experiences, and the formation of echo chambers …

Advertising To Generation Z, Taryn Romaine

Honors College Theses

The goal of this project is to analyze the history and background of those born between 1997 and 2012, also known as Generation Z, and determine its effect on how this Generation receives and reacts to advertising. In addition, through the use of a personally created and conducted poll, I gathered data on a portion of Generation Z individuals and their preferences to certain elements of advertisement design. These elements are text content, layout, color, and relatability/authenticity. My project discusses how advertisers and advertisement designers, such as myself, can implement these preferences in order to effectively advertise to Generation Z. …

Cliffhanger, Micah Mickles

MFA in Visual Art

I am Micah Mickles, a mixed-media visual artist in St. Louis, Missouri. My artwork is deeply rooted in my personal experiences and serves as a memorial and monument to counteract the enduring effects of grief and loss. What sets my work apart is the transformative impact of my everyday encounters, inspired by my 14 years of experience working at Trader Joe's. These encounters have led me to reflect on my profound connections with diverse communities. By delving into the hidden narratives of mundane materials encountered in the workplace, I prompt a reexamination of convenience and supply chain origins. Inspired by …

Crux: Urban Ecology And Cultural Essence, Maria Del Valle

Bachelor of Architecture Theses - 5th Year

The CRUX, stands for islands grappling with the aftermath of hurricanes. Its transformative vision is set against the backdrop of a city scarred by abandoned homes, tainted water sources, agricultural decay, and a crippled electrical grid. CRUX aspires to breathe new life into this urban landscape, envisioning a self-sustaining city dedicated to nurturing community ties for the resilient people of Yabucoa. The testament to the restoration is not just physical structures, but the research studies the very spirit of the community. By delving into the realms of art, farming, Afro-Carribbean culture, and food, the project seeks to create a vibrant …

The Perfect Model: Exploring Gender Differences Within Commercial Graphic Design Preferences, Adeline Roberts

Undergraduate Theses

Personal preferences within graphic design are heavily shaped by social factors, including cultural practices. This project explores the effect of gendered-based experiences on visual design preferences, through investigating men’s and women’s preferences regarding graphic design elements, and the source of these opinions. The data was then used to create two educational images, which mimic contemporary magazine covers, visually illustrating the effects of gendered marketing and experiences on personal design preferences. These images were then attached to an interactive website, so that the findings and pieces from this project can be easily accessed by future audiences.