Art and Design Commons^™

Control Theory, Colin Yoon

Masters Theses

When people feel that everything is out of control, their natural response would be to turn to a designated space to manipulate anything within it, whether a physical environment or a digital platform. This book expresses the comforts of order and predictability in response to the chaos and confusion that emerged from the train wreck known as 2020. After everything that has happened, it’s understandable that people want to have some semblance of control over something in their lives, as predictability makes them feel safe, intelligent, and powerful.

Mars Is For Fags, Justin Quaid Grubb

Masters Theses

The overarching theme dealt with in my work relates to the Space Age - specifically the predictive futuristic approach to product design and the pop culture that came out of the movement. During this time, technological advancements permeated American culture. Manufactures made the future accessible to everyone and futuristic living became symbolic of innovation, progress, and prosperity. A blueprint for a futurist suburban utopia was forged and the American people were ready to embody the new “American Dream.” Residential Mid-Century Modern architecture emerged as the new site for this dream and along with it came a new way of life. …

This Trash Is Someone Else's Problem, Lauren Goodman

Masters Theses

This Trash is Someone Else’s Problem reimagines object design practices through a decolonial lens that embraces responsive approaches to the local environment and the communities that steward it. It advocates for design justice and social equality. The physical work was developed from discarded scraps of industrial waste harvested from the Providence area, such as wire fencing, oil drums, rebar and steel tubing. It was created without the use of expensive tools, machinery and materials in favour of a less extractive approach to design. In conjunction with the studio work is a series of community gatherings focused on low-fi ceramic pit …

Building Narratives: Instilling Old Stories In New Spaces, Sharanya Aggarwal

Masters Theses

Here in Gurugram, tall, uniform, cold, imposing buildings loom over a newly developed metropolis, futilely competing with each other to become remarkable landmarks of the near future. Here, I close my eyes and fondly remember the celebratory streets and inextinguishable, vibrant atmosphere of New Delhi, one of the oldest cities in the country, which I used to joyfully call my home. Opening my eyes, all I see when I look outside my window are either vast spans of bare land or vertical skyscrapers and construction sites. Memories of home, objects, places, and streets are my living archive of my past …

A Family Game: Tell The Stories That Shape Us, Zhuoyan Xie

Masters Theses

There are a lot of books and theories on the market to help improve our communication skills and relationship with others. However, they hardly mention that the fundamental principle behind our relationship to others is how we understand and accept ourselves. The thesis aims to promote our understanding of our own identity and identities of our family members. It is worthy to mention that the thesis is conducted in a Chinese context. The thesis mainly learned from Non-violent communication and theories about identity, especially narrative identity. The deliverables are a set of narrative cards and prompts that can be played …

Zoomorphic Extended Body, Nicholas Tamas

Masters Theses

My thesis work is built around emerging technologies within the fields of prosthetic and robotics. The end result is a speculative proposal with how to expand the potential modes of use with these emerging technologies to extend and build upon their potential uses.

Records Of (Un)Learning, Gregory Deddo

Masters Theses

The internal processes by which we remember and learn (mnēmē) are in tension with the exterior mnemonic devices of writing, photography, and archives (hypomnēsis). Attempts to accurately record and document our lives often disrupt the living, intersubjective memory it is meant to aid. This dichotomy plays out in both the interpersonal sphere of relationships and identity, and in the socio-political sphere of history, governance, and economics. Our contemporary postmodern condition, as shaped by technologic developments, is marked by an increased skepticism about testimony, witness, and experience and a greater reliance on data-driven information and the structure …

In The Muck And The Mire, Orli Swergold

Masters Theses

At the core of my practice lies my fascination with my body; how I exist in relation to others and my surroundings, how much space I take up, how close I am to others, how much distance exists between us. I am interested in intimacy and bodily contact, which I explore through objects that bridge the gap between human embodiment and otherness. My works, made out of paper pulp, simultaneously stimulate a hyperawareness of one’s own body and a dissolution of the self. Their human scale immediately places them in relation to the viewer and creates space for empathy. As …

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.

Everyone I Have Every Crowed With 2021-, Hannah Lutz Winkler

Masters Theses

I started taking walks at sunset to feel better. It was January of 2021, nearly a year into the COVID pandemic. On these antidepressant walks, I kept running into crows, participating in their own sunset ritual, hundreds of them in a raucous shimmering black net. They flew around the city, my hometown, gathering, gossiping, and ultimately sleeping together in trees. I was both intoxicated by and jealous of the nightly crow party—standing under them was my only crowd experience in nine months. For the next three months, I tracked them every night I could. My solo practice of paying the …

An Evolving Process: Patterns And Objects, Shreya Tuli

Masters Theses

This thesis investigates my life experiences,inspired by the surroundings in New England and India.

My process is characterized by a multidisciplinary approach. I integrate diverse media moving fluidly between two dimensional and three dimensional work, creating multiple layers of pattern and objects.

Fableware From The Garden Of The Grotesque, Matt Becker

Masters Theses

In biology, a chimaera is created when two zygotes collide at an early stage of development, resulting in a unique creature containing two distinct sets of genes. The name is borrowed from Greek mythology where chimaeras are fire-breathing monsters born with the mixed attributes of lions, snakes, and goats. As creatures of myth, chimaera represent a narrative union of disparate parts; a collision of the fantastic and the mundane.

Clay can be used to explore this dichotomy, utilizing its ability as a mutable canvas to embody a vast range of visual vocabularies while referencing its rich history and placing new …

Uncertainty Wanted: Deconstructing Gender Gap In Parenting Mentality, Zimeng Xiang

Masters Theses

Gender stereotypes propagate through generations like a loop without a clear start or end, constantly reinforcing and being reinforced by the constructed, gendered system of information around us. For this project, I take the start of parenthood - the moment when new parents begin to learn everything about newborn care - as a critical point to encourage gender-neutral parenthood and eventually, to fill the gender gap in parents’ mental load.

Personal Positioning System, Laura Diez De Baldeon

Masters Theses

Personal Positioning System (PPS) is an exploration of spatial memory in an unstable world. While the GPS gathers many different, shifting data points in order to provide us with an apparently stable representation of our position, a longitude and latitude in the earth’s grid, PPS offers alternative forms of mapping based on a more flexible unit: memory. PPS reverses the directionality of the GPS and returns to the fragmentary; it disperses rather than unifies, offshooting in different directions, overlaying the intimate on corporate territory, chasing the shifting flow of geographical information. It conceives of design as a spatial practice, one …

Dal And Rice, Anushka Divecha

Masters Theses

I have always been a nostalgic person. I have boxes of old photographs, letters, birthday cards and objects from significant days in my life. I have confetti from different concerts, friendship bracelets and old diaries. While typically not represented by keepsakes, memories of food are some of my strongest. They encompass all five senses, which is perhaps why they are so powerful. Every time I smell a spice or taste something familiar, I am instantly transported to a certain place and time.

As a textile artist, I use materials, textures, imagery, and senses to evoke place and time. This year …

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 …

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 …

Taking Care, John Dixon

Masters Theses

We’ve come to live our lives on a quest for what we deem as efficiency, but has our view on the matter been focused on the wrong measures? Taking Care investigates efficiency utilizing a variety of different comparative measures through the creation of 8 chairs. When our emphasis on certain variables is shifted, is mass production the most efficient means of making? What about one-off production utilizing local materials? Does industry’s approach to ergonomics focus on efficiencies benefitting the employer while sacrificing those of the employee? Working from a Wendell Berry quote contrasting care to efficiency as a point of …

Making Meaning, Eric Loucks

Masters Theses

Making Meaning explores mental health through the lens of a contemporary craft-based design practice. Themes of identity, catharsis, connection, flow, teaching, and community create a framework for understanding the role craft plays in developing and maintaining a healthy mindset. The physical pieces that result from this approach are meticulously made, highly considered, and given the quality of contemporary heirloom: a piece that promotes a kind of emotional connection and wellness in their owner.

Inter - : Design For Fostering Action-Oriented Awareness Towards Sustainable Transition, Elena Danlei Huang

Masters Theses

In order to meet the need for sustainable transition, it is vital for the general public to be aware of the social and ecological interconnectedness within existential climate crisis, local sustainable development, and urban individual’s behavioral patterns. As a method to rebuild interconnectedness, this thesis explores design interventions for fostering action-oriented awareness towards sustainable transition. Jumping out from the current paradigm, it tries to connect the audience to alternative conceptual representations. An integrated theoretical model built around a local contextualized issue is proposed in the thesis, followed by a practice-based case project focusing on Rhode Island Squid Fishery as a …

Polyrhythms, Kevin Costante

Masters Theses

This work strives to integrate seemingly ‘distant’ practices into a concept by emphasizing their differences. A syncopation between a maker and designer, a planner and improviser. A search for commonalities in the middle of what otherwise creates conflict. I cultivate a space to play alongside my inherent formalities by incorporating color and movement. I find rhythm persists uninterrupted through the discrepancies of my process and inspirations. I want to see it in the outcomes of my work.

How can I be compatible with this world of rudiments and structure and also comply with my reliance on ‘chance’?

Katti-Batti : A Digital Tool For Young Adolescents To Transgress The Limitations Of Gender Socialization Through Empathy & Friendship, Chetan Dusane

Masters Theses

The genesis of this project lies in the personal experiences that led me to believe that the culturally learned and perceived gender roles, norms, and expectations limit a person’s health, educational, professional, economic, and social abilities.

The work began by finding the evidence connecting the learned, perceived gender roles, norms, and allied cultural expectations to the ability to think freely. The research revealed the limiting effects of gender roles and norms on self-identity, personal belief systems, and a place’s culture. The study further led to uncovering the link between limiting personal belief systems and cultural environment to the lack of …

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 …

Beauty Still Lives Here: Narratives Of Radical Self-Love, Deshun Peoples

Masters Theses

This exhibition is primarily concerned with the act of taking up physical and socio-political space. Through the use of form, design, color, and installation this work places various histories and traditions of both ceramics and resistance in communication with one another. The red, black, and green of Marcus Garvey’s 1920 Pan-African/Black American flag are proudly displayed against a warm, calm, pale green backdrop to highlight the importance of mental health in all endeavors, especially in the emotionally taxing labor of social, political, and economic protest in the battle for humanity, life, civil rights, equity, access, and decision-making power.

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 …

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.

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, …

The Relativity Of Value, Lai Xu

Masters Theses

My practice is an inquiry into the fluctuation of value. To deconstruct the simplistic consumer tropes of mundane/luxury, simple/complex, or hidden/obvious, I experiment with speculative forms of hybridization using interactive media platforms to create an alternate temporality. Microscopic moments open the door to design opportunities. Through field observations, image sequences, data, and archives of artifacts, I roll out the simple signifiers of symbolic value to pause attention while also exposing the paradox of our consumptive behaviors.

What Do I See Between 2 To 8 O'Clock, Youtian Duan

Masters Theses

We record our daily life, our daily emotions. But maybe we lie to ourselves. Or our expression is a kind of hope: what we want to look like or want others to think we are like. Unfortunately, it’s usually not our natural appearance, not the honest thoughts in our hearts. Maybe we don’t understand ourselves.

I like to record my dreams. In the dream world, sometimes I relax, sometimes nervous, and unconsciously wander around. That is the real me. In my unconscious dream state, I identify myself, know myself, again and again. I can live in peace with a world …

Loose Threads / Hilos Sueltos, Estefanía De Ros

Masters Theses

In this body of work, I’ve collaborated with four artisans from my home country, Guatemala: Apolonio Vicente, Vinicio Vicente, Mario Poz and Manuel Otsojay. They all use traditional craft methods with natural materials: wicker, wool, and cotton. I interweave, overlap, and knot mementos from my childhood with current ideas and dialogues that contain loose threads to the work. All of the layers merge in fluid forms with texture and movement. The curtains let light in, the rug sets warmth, and the “cayuco” invites you to slow down.

I aim to push back against the devaluing of craft traditions, especially in …