Art and Design Commons^™

Writ In Water, Jack Tufts

Masters Theses

This thesis celebrates impermanence; that all things are transitory, in a perpetual state of flux. Yet the idea of place is a perception that endures; it is what we carry with us.

Here lies this thesis, Writ In Water.

On the surface, there is a layer of impermanence: fragments dispersed, dissolved memories, words washed away. Water is a medium for memory, carrying the ephemeral debris on the surface. I take what the water gives me, reaching in to pull out the remains to build a home, for wherever the water takes me. I gather fragments as a form of …

Openness, Qiwen Ju

Masters Theses

We perceive the world as flat when we close one eye. When both eyes are open, the world takes on a three-dimensional quality.

Our childhood, education, family, and environment form and bind our cognitive perspective. As the ancient Chinese proverb goes: “You can’t see Mount Tai by blinding your eyes with one leaf.” Truth is exceedingly difficult to discern. Like the obscuring leaf, there are blind spots in our vision. Prejudice is often the narrow leaf that obstructs perception, preventing us from seeing with greater dimension.

For actual comprehension, we can only see through the eyes, hearts, and minds of …

Alien Encyclopedia, Zengqi Guo

Masters Theses

Alien Encyclopedia is a body of work that analyzes, expands, redefines, and leverages the definition of “alien” as both problematic and an avenue of possibility. By mapping the word “alien” as a fragmented play of alternatives, I translate the lessons derived from this exploration into a maker’s lexicon. I use “alien” to frame my identity, as a prompt to ground my projects, a factor to interrupt existing typography and to spark questions, a generative tool to explore the interpolation between the familiar and unfamiliar, and to incite new solutions and actions to solve the problems we are facing now. Alien …

!, Nick Larson

Masters Theses

This thesis uses the exclamation point to represent a way of thinking and working methodology. The exclamation point in mathematics represents a factorial function, an operation for determining all possible orders of a set. Colloquially, the meaning of the exclamation point relies entirely on context. Within a yellow triangle, it means caution or danger, but at the end of a sentence delivering good news, it means excitement. In the context of this thesis, the exclamation point represents enthusiastically and exhaustively reordering objects, words, and processes to highlight shifting meaning.

Other Realms, Louis Rakovich

Masters Theses

Can a system existing in rigid order be taken back to a state of malleability, a space of potential not yet actualized?

If creation reduces the infinite to produce the finite, then in the simplest sense, creation is the process of bringing something tangible, real, out of the ether—out of the primordial chaos of possibility. The technique of defamiliarization can be viewed as an agent of de-creation, the active reversal of creation, in order to make creation possible once again. As such it holds spiritual power in its own right.

In pursuit of this state of renewed potentiality, I use …

Re-Order The Order Of Thing, Yingxi Sabrina Ji

Masters Theses

Humanocentrism positions humans as the measure of all things; what we know as the ‘real’ or ‘true’ is perceived through this limited perspective. As a designer, I challenge the hierarchy, actively moving away from the notion that inanimate objects are subjugated matter.

In this body of work, I turn to actions of world-building to create immersive experiences where ‘objects’ become ‘subjects.’ They are rescaled and re-centered — called into prominence to become protagonists on the cultural and environmental stage. Through generating, collaging, and juxtaposing recycled facts, imagery and organic materials using digital filters, I insert absurdity as a breakpoint to …

Slow Ruptures; Slow Formations, Asta Thrastardottir

Masters Theses

Language shapes our understanding of identity, place, and self. As a graphic designer, I question the existing structures of language, while using it as a material to build new formations. Nudging against certainties, I challenge how the stories we are told can dispossess us, even flatten us.

My method is a constant attempt to peel back the layers and study what lingers below. When questions arise, I look to the ways in which visual artists and writers have seen through this surface. I observe, listen, and hold stories closely, passing them back and forth between my hands. Using annotation and …

Ports Of Entry, Forough Abadian

Masters Theses

Ports of entry are places where one may lawfully enter a country by crossing land and sea borders‭. ‬This thesis frames the space conceptually where the boundaries of place, time, culture, and identity are crossed through existing ports or by building new ones. ‬

As an Iranian immigrant in the United States‭, ‬displacement of identity informs my worldview and design practice‭. ‬I find myself between two worlds, one inherited and the other adopted. ‬Both worlds are simultaneously active and exert their forces on my thought process‭. However, their interrelated dynamic is ambivalent because their path intersects and diverges unforeseeably‭. ‬My …

Connect: Translating Complexity Through Visual Simplification, Ilhee Park

Masters Theses

CONNECT: Translating Complexity through Visual Simplification brings complex data into concise visual systems that encourage ease of access. With a background in Human Factors Engineering, user engagement remains a central focus in my design. Whether reducing barriers to scientific information or untangling deeply complex data, design must contain intuitive concepts without the need for extended explanation. Using bold color and geometric shapes as the core design language to render pictorial narratives, this thesis maps my development as an information designer through modes of gathering, deciphering, and interpreting.

Open Articulations, Matthew Bejtlich

Masters Theses

Open Articulations invites an exchange between human and environmental worlds through cycles of improvisation, reflection, and rebirth. It is a study of how exchanges emerge, what forms they can take, how they are mediated, and how we can sustain them with each other and with our surroundings. Through our coordinated immersion in landscapes and our spontaneous creation in them through frameworks encouraging play, we channel the spirit of a jazz drummer riffing with his midnight quartet, exchanging rhythms, images, sounds, movements, and textual fragments. A gentle breath, a flickering sensation, a gesture: expressions of a specific time rooted in a …

Paperwork, Romik Bose Mitra

Masters Theses

This thesis is about the politics of identity and belonging. It is about the impact that practices of identification, government surveillance, and global systems of citizenship and nationality have on the people that live by them. Inspired by the various borders (both real and imagined) that I maneuvered around to get to Rhode Island, and enriched with perspectives gathered in conversation with theoreticians in the field, Paperwork is a set of documents and debriefs that details the work that I made in response to a migratory and investigatory journey. Through this thesis, I attempt to better understand various bureaucratic practices …

Elsewhere: Impressions Of Sense & Nonsense, Madeline Woods

Masters Theses

I’m not going to give it all away up front, but here are a few things you’ll find inside: a flower that tastes like peppermint, a book that smells like sunscreen, a silver orb that purrs, a woman becoming a tree, a shy rainbow, and a hat that is also a disguise. There are lists, letters, dreams, and notes. I hope there aren’t typos, but I’m only human, after all. There is sense, and there is also nonsense.

If you decide to join me here, we will wander elsewhere — across different kinds of terrain, into sensory experiences, between mediums, …

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 …

Parentheses Asterisk Ellipses, Everett Epstein

Masters Theses

Textual punctuation — those common marks that pace a text — are rarely static. They allow a message to flow, providing space and also emphasis. While words hold the stage, humble commas and periods coax the message.

This thesis urges another orientation to these tools, with the graphic designer assuming the role of one who principally punctuates. In Parentheses Asterisk Ellipses, punctuation becomes the primary driver of meaning — a perfect technology for rich associative networks of history, type, and the social. Tracing the grain of these forms, Parentheses Asterisk Ellipses offers a close reading of the three marks in …

Future As Medium, Georgie Nolan

Masters Theses

FUTURE AS MEDIUM through critical examination develops a working premise for advancing designed visualizations of the future. In an effort to build new models of practice that consciously work towards the future, I undertake a set of delicate negotiations rooted in critical inquiry as well as creative production, all expressed across three temporal contingencies: yesterday, today and tomorrow.

I work the terrain of the past as an assembled archive of speculative worlds created by architects, designers, and artists, and problematize the mediation of futures through a close reading of their world-building tools. I use this archive to make sense of …

Jettisoning The Frame: Strategies For Designing At The Threshold, Will Mianecki

Masters Theses

Jettisoning the Frame: Strategies for Designing at the Threshold explores graphic design’s capacity for facilitating critique and understanding of accelerating systems of technological control and complexity. Working across archives, architectures, and infrastructures, designing at the threshold is an approach that takes the opacity of systems and subjects alike as a starting point from which new possibilities, configurations, and relations emerge. It is a loose methodology predicated on shifting, jettisoning, and reorienting the role and frame of the designer from objectivity to subjectivity. From neutrality to implication. From scientific to messy. From solutionism to something else.

Refiguring Relations, Daphne Hsu

Masters Theses

Refiguring Relations sets conditions for interdependence and visualizes the affective relationships that people have with one another. Through scripts and participatory experiences, my work explores, challenges, and formulates expressions of collaboration. I extend spaces of overlap between individuals to encourage connection and alliance building, however temporary, slow, or small. In reading experiences, both print and digital, models of circulation and accessibility allow the audience to see and affect each others’ interactions. This thesis assembles methodologies and blueprints for reciprocal engagement, between designer and collaborators, designer and participants, and among participants themselves.

Ctrl Shift, Kit Son Lee

Masters Theses

CTRL SHIFT makes a case for design under contemporary computation. The abstractions of reading, writing, metaphors, mythology, code, cryptography, interfaces, and other such symbolic languages are leveraged as tools for understanding. Alternative modes of knowledge become access points through which users can subvert the control structures of software. By challenging the singular expertise of programmers, the work presented within advocates for the examination of internalized beliefs, the redistribution of networked power, and the collective sabotage of computational authority.

Ethnographemes, Vaishnavi Mahendran

Masters Theses

Spoken and written languages are living processes. As with our own natural systems, they are born, evolve in stages, yet also face the eventuality of death. Current research indicates that there are 7,111 spoken languages in the world. UNESCO lists a total of 577 languages as critically endangered.

This thesis examines the role of graphic design and its potential contribution to the preservation of endangered languages and writing systems of indigenous communities. My interest lies in exploring possibilities of the script serving as a vessel to share and celebrate deeper stories of each of these communities’ heritage.

Through my practice, …

Re: Ornament, Aleks Dawson

Masters Theses

Re:Ornament calls for a rethinking of ornament within the history and practice of design, urging a broad reconsideration of ornament’s value and a complete reimagining of ornament’s future potential. Charting the arc of ornament in the Western tradition, this thesis reexamines the impact of modernism’s rejection of ornament—and, with it, its embedded culture, history, knowledge and craft.

Studying ornament’s structure as a language, I make the case for ornament’s inherent beauty and excess and speculate on how ornament could apply to thinking and making beyond design. Through graphic form, material exploration and pattern thinking, I …

Binge [Fantasy Reality], Elena Foraker

Masters Theses

[My appreciation for mainstream pop culture is genuine, but I am not a passive consumer.]

[Drawing from embodied experience and contemporary feminist theory, I design as a participant, cultural surveyor, and critic.]

[From these vantage points, I binge-watch to discern the tropes of media such as reality TV romance and dead girl shows.]

[My data bingeing leads to a process of archiving, de/recoding, and making visible the algorithm structuring pop culture.]

[“Fantasy” is derived from the Greek phantazein, meaning “to make visible.”]

[In this thesis, I demonstrate that the reality-fantasy relationship is not an either/or.]

[Reality TV challenges this notion …

U+16e99, Bobby Joe Smith Iii

Masters Theses

The general understanding and professional practice of graphic design have been shaped by the perspectives, needs, and desires of white, cis-gendered, heterosexual men in imperialist, capitalist societies. The tools, substrates, professional networks, institutions, processes, theories, grammars, and values that have come to define the discipline have been formed from this position. Consequently, graphic design primarily serves the needs of the settler in settler colonial regimes like the United States. This reality has prompted many designers like myself who come from colonized communities or whose identity troubles this rubric to question the framework of the discipline and our position within it. …

A Very Large Array, Hilary Dupont

Masters Theses

The Very Large Array is a radio telescope in a remote area of western New Mexico. An array is a single telescope made out of multiple satellite dishes. The satellite dishes move in and out on tracks to focus on different distant points in the solar system. These multiple dishes are functioning together to look at one single point, the combined powers of the satellite dishes results in a sharper focus.

This book is an array. The objects included are my observations, interests, experiences and ideas. My thesis is a point in the distance, and I am looking at it …

Counter Formation, Fabian Fohrer

Masters Theses

Counter-formation establishes a foundation to envision a more accurate shape and field of inter-relations across disciplines and contexts that are not only receptive but appropriative and elaborative.

By approaching the space of the counter-form, my ambition is to generate a responsive structure and an archive of fragments to build upon - a blank canvas with a variable format to recast vision and action.

Counter-formation places emphasis on the transformative, liminal space that allows one to encounter contexts from within, between, and around to organize or break them in a different fashion.

Something To See Here, Weixi Zeng

Masters Theses

“Nothing to see here” is a suspicious phrase.

Whenever we hear it, we pause and become alerted. Something is most likely indeed happening, and worth noting — mishaps ranging from either an embarrassing coffee spill, unfair abuses of privacy, or insidious early signs of a pandemic.

Historically, states and national entities have always valued the power of information to allow them to see more, and see better — all the while obstructing the path to clarity for ordinary citizens. Systems and infrastructure have become expressions of authority, rife with distortion and deception. Familiar systems are commandeered to surveil us, yet …

My Millennial Asian Fetishized American Fantasy, Seyong Ahn

Masters Theses

The perspectives that I present throughout My Millennial Asian Fetishized American Fantasy are South Korean-centric, biased, absurd, skewed, unfair, and real.

Instead of being nostalgic, the contents introduce questions—ones that persist as I examine my design practice. They open a process of dialogue with the present, while provoking a consideration of the future:

1) If I am a product of capitalism and globalization, how might I better interrogate and define my cultural DNA?

2) What is my approach to the evolving conception of graphic design under new (technological, ethical, ontological) conditions?

3) What interests and concerns truly engage me, such …

Strata : Lessons In Latency, Mukul Chakravarthi

Masters Theses

Every visual artifact, from a street sign to advertising commercials, is an event of culture, a cross-section of time. Crucial to my work as a designer is to build an interpretive understanding of these images as more than surface, more than banal. Embedded in their construction are dense, unseen contextual latencies— social, economic, and political forces — that combine to define a cultural moment.

This thesis offers a series of lessons in making visible visual infrastructure. It emphasizes design’s semiotic potential to examine and leverage a view on what these visual signs represent as ideological constructions. Through a conscious un-layering …

Oh Wait, Is This A Loop?, Carl-Gustaf Ewerbring

Masters Theses

When Photography as a medium arrived, it changed our world. It caused us to reinvent many things, one of them being the medium of painting. All of a sudden, a realistically painted picture was no longer the best possible way to document and archive visual qualities. New styles of painting evolved, and the medium grew into something bigger than before.

The web arrived more than three decades ago. What mediums has radically changed since then? Or more important, what mediums should we reinvent because of the web? This book is an systematic attempt to investigate that question.

What I knew …

Temporal Collisions, Lizzie Baur

Masters Theses

We live during a time of smoothly effortless design that encourages instant gratification. In this sea of pre-existing content, most of which we experience through layers of mediation, my practice encourages drifting. As a graphic designer, I try to decondition myself from reductive thinking. In response, this thesis operates on the fringe, cycling attention to unexpected associations, harnessing temporal collisions and formal play towards diminishing cultural baggage and preconceived notions. I deliberately attune the reader to the labyrinthine as an experience by which to interrogate common sense and steer the imagination towards moments of uncertainty.

This work engages a kind …

Ancient Hyper Present, Sophie Loloi

Masters Theses

My practice, especially this virtual garden, is a collage made of media, images, and virtual space across different eras and time signatures. Graphic design can exist in a gallery, on the screen, inside headsets or in the streets. Like a lucid dream, it can be disorienting as it opens up to a more-than physical ground of experience; within the virtual, within shared memory. This reflective practice arises as a form of “anachronism.” Before I could arrive at my transdisciplinary practice that considers experiences of exile and diaspora, I had to grapple with a singular question: what does it mean to …