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Full-Text Articles in Art and Design
Constellations, Maria Rull Bescós
Constellations, Maria Rull Bescós
Masters Theses
In this book you will find a collection of projects that both reflect and simultaneously reinvent my personal way of seeing the world, which I consider to be a space that is complex, diverse, and in continuous transformation.
Graphic design is the lens through which I examine and understand this complexity, and it is also the medium through which I translate this huge realm into navigable systems of ideas, tales, forms, and experiences.
I have been inspired to produce my own systems in response to those I discover through actively observing my environment (territory), reflecting upon my personal background (origin), …
Placefulness, Ellen Christensen
Placefulness, Ellen Christensen
Masters Theses
Graphic design has been referred to as a tool of inquiry — a method of thinking visually. Design can polish, beautify, hierarchize, eliminate, prioritize, propagandize, or disseminate. Using spatial inquiry as a primary mode of investigation, I argue that graphic design is also a process of attention and care. How can graphic design be a tool of expansion and inclusion?
By encouraging spaces of attention and listening within the built environment and virtual worlds, we can think critically about power dynamics, interiority and exteriority, and subjectivity and objectivity. Within this phase of late capitalism, I focus on leftovers, scraps, and …
Tiny Diasporas, Angela Lorenzo
Tiny Diasporas, Angela Lorenzo
Masters Theses
I see myself as a literary curator — I collect and sequence texts and images, both digital and analog, to reveal, connect, and construct narratives, resulting in shifting meanings and significances. Inhabiting this curatorial ethos, I investigate hidden subtexts, locating personal and collective relations to the margins and files marked “miscellany.” Working in books and installations, I engage with the inherited meanings of visual languages (form, typography, color, material, format) to open up well-worn narratives and craft new interpretations.
Tiny Diasporas is a primer to a design practice that borrows the form of an abecedarius, an alphabetical wordlist for learning …
Space, Junk, Brandon Olsen
Space, Junk, Brandon Olsen
Masters Theses
Space, Junk acknowledges and embraces the world as a chaotic and uncertain place. Graphic design often directly contrasts the messiness of humanity. Clean and ordered composition can conceal the muddled nature of a subject. The designer's role isn't to force perfection, but to create an aesthetic that accurately represents content. I place value on rips, smears, blurriness, and distortion as well as feelings provoked by variability. Through works created in multiple spaces (book space, architectural space, web space, etc.) this thesis focuses on finding worth in undervalued junk, using mess as a means to represent convoluted issues, and utilizing fun …
Reading Rooms, Jinhwa Oh
Reading Rooms, Jinhwa Oh
Masters Theses
Reading rooms examines a set of three conditions for diverse modes of spatial reading. These conditions originate from three common terms: object, space, and performer, which I have subjectively defined through my thesis work. I hope to clarify my own design methodology by examining these terminologies through the thesis process.
I regard printed media as independent objects which have physical qualities: material, texture, volume, and depth. My practice emphasizes physical forms as architectural structures which can be transformed and evolve through readers’ interpretations of the objects. The true communication with my physical work can be realized by touching, moving, and …
Hyperlink : Connecting Space, Time, Language, And Technology, Marie Otsuka
Hyperlink : Connecting Space, Time, Language, And Technology, Marie Otsuka
Masters Theses
This thesis constitutes a methodology for examining our use of systems and tools. We are constantly generating physical and digital residues, and tracing them can reveal an underlying syntax of structures that produced them. I work with these artifacts to highlight the capacities and constraints of language and technology, and what results is a transparency that draws us closer to the raw material. Once broken down into bare elements, new forms can then be resynthesized. Both critical and celebratory, this inquiry uncovers logical structures to reimagine means of making and to create alternate tools for thought.
Haunt : Casual Surrealism, Cara Buzzell
Haunt : Casual Surrealism, Cara Buzzell
Masters Theses
This thesis aims to define, observe and create a feeling of surrealism through a series of design gestures. The process began with a question: If I, as a designer, immerse myself in a subculture that I have no interest in, will I become a fan of it? To attempt this, I created systems and tools to deeply investigate each subculture. I observed and recorded what I experienced. As a case study, the haunted attraction community captured my attention. I went to their conventions and took classes in the crafts of “the haunt.” While immersed in this community, I started to …
Monument For Feeling : Notes From The Archivist, Melissa Weiss
Monument For Feeling : Notes From The Archivist, Melissa Weiss
Masters Theses
I’ve always loved the conjunctions unless, yet, however, although. Grammatical interventions, they subvert all things certain, rational, and indisputable, opening a series of syntactic doorways into new, undetermined possibilities.
The pieces in the Institute fo? Contempo?a?y Inqui?y’s archive function like those conjunctions. They refuse and destabilize easy categorization, pointing, like a rhizome, toward a thousand different possible pasts — and just as many futures.
To be clear, the Institute fo? Contempo?a?y Inqui?y does not have a physical site. It is a network of psychic locations materialized through its archive. It is, in other words, what I have gathered.
I have …
Field Guide : Collected Studies Of A Symbiont, Jennifer Livermore
Field Guide : Collected Studies Of A Symbiont, Jennifer Livermore
Masters Theses
Field Guide is a collection of studies that explore how symbiosis relates to graphic design. These studies investigate how visual language constructs — and is constructed by — ideas about nature.
As a manipulator of language and imagery, I borrow the ecologist’s methods in order to make sense of our relationship with the natural world. My techniques include observation, collection, mutation, framing and recombination. I use these methods not to celebrate them, but to expose their subjective nature.
I approach visual language, technology, and our ecological home as an entangled set of ideas rather than estranged categories. My work investigates …
Anachropomorphism!, Carson Evans
Anachropomorphism!, Carson Evans
Masters Theses
Folks, the Truth is hard to know—if can be known at all.¹ Conventional Western wisdom tells us: stick to the facts. (I’m looking at you, Enlightenment.) We privilege the written word as an objective and reliable vehicle for communication. Useful, yes, but we over-rely. I counter with this: bodily performativity and purposeful inaccuracy that produces, paradoxically, narrative accuracy. These methods roil in our gut or tug at our heartstrings—instead of recoiling, we should embrace them.
I like to unpack “the stories we tell ourselves,”² our personal and societal mythologies, with a particular eye to how the past plays a role …
This Is Public Work, Nick Adam
This Is Public Work, Nick Adam
Masters Theses
This thesis positions graphic design as an integral form of public works.
T his is public work regards the causal relationship between graphic design and its publics as an opportunity to explore the formal maneuvers to enhance an artifact's visual codes. The idea is an experiential one: rich and meaningful form can lead to rich and meaningful experiences.
The designed artifacts of our world function across informational (effect) and emotional (affect) modes. The complexity of these operations take on an infrastructural role — what we see day-to-day shapes our experiences and understanding. The opportunity of a designer to practice in …