Art and Design Commons^™

Machine Girl, Yutong Liu

Theses and Dissertations

Machine girl is a character that mimics biology, labor, and humanity.

She relates to machine sympathy and machine learning; She is updating and processing of big data. During the interaction between me and the machine, I found you --- Machine girl.

Machine girl is a brilliant girl. She is an excellent translator and communicator, which is determined by her ability for machine learning. The cyber living space gives her a fundamental learning gift with a mathematical algorithm. She uses this gift to mimic everything from the human brain. She is not reasonable but sensitive. There are many different versions of …

A Thesis Is A Product Is A Tracking, Yixue Li

Theses and Dissertations

In this work, I discuss how global products/ identities are made, transported and consumed, and the inevitable ‘mis-’ in acts of transmission. This research ranges from the miscommunication in languages and linguistics, to the gap between production and consumption. I investigate how things and humans are misread, mispronounced, misfit and mistranslated when they traverse social and cultural borders, arriving at a place in between languages, holding on to and letting go of things that are familiar to neither and both cultures. This work explores diverse media such as publications, videos and installations, and examines how they maybe used to address …

The Day Is Just Another Surface, Brooks M. Heintzelman

Theses and Dissertations

Within a practice founded on both typographic form and language, I have continued to push myself to make work that is more sensitive to place, more contextual, more (hopefully) generous toward a public audience. These pieces might serve as useful instruments of institutional critique, resources for comprehension, or moments in which to interrogate preconceived modes of seeing. I deploy original texts in public spaces in order that they might force viewers to decide how to personally resolve the content they encounter. Is it language or object? Literal or figurative? Graphic design or art? The further I develop this body of …

Good As We Know It: Goodness In Design Discourse Since 1870, Garreth C. Blackwell

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines the ways in which design and design practitioners have defined value in the design discourse through the vocabulary and concept of goodness since 1870. These definitions of value have been central to design discourse both past and present and deal with the impact and purpose of design work as well as its role in the creation of the approaching future. Since before the coalescence of graphic design as a separate field of design, these questions have been tied to the form, function or social impact of the objects created by designers. Despite the prevalence of this line …

It's Slapstick Design, Thanks! Wait! No "Thanks"- Just Slapstick Design ..., Curtis A. Bailey

Theses and Dissertations

I'm arguing for an approach to generating graphic form based on slapstick. Slapstick is a genre of physical comedy involving humorous portrayals of clumsiness, mistakes, and nonsense. I investigate it as an approach to form, content, process, and communication. These methods were used to construct an immersive installation loosely based on The Tibetan Book of the Dead.

Graphic design is expected to function. It does this by conditioning users to its particular patterns or by skillfully implementing familiar patterns. A slapstick approach to graphic design is valuable as a critical tool for disrupting conditioned experiences for promoting empathy by relating …

Polycultural Interactions: Fuzzy Identity, Xi Lu

Theses and Dissertations

“Robin D.G. Kelley coined the term polyculturalism as an alternative to multiculturalism, ‘since the latter often implies that cultures are fixed, discrete entities that exist side by side—a kind of zoological approach to culture.’ ”

Polyculturalism assumes the whole world’s cultures are interactive and fluid instead of independent and static, and individuals’ relationship to cultures are complex and cannot be categorized. Yet an individual constitutes multiple cultures, and individual identity embraces the various forms of culture in all aspects of one’s life.

My research examines how polyculturalism affects aspects of communications among people who hold a multiplicity of voices. It …

Side A, Side B, Hong Zhang

Theses and Dissertations

I believe that aural and visual language can contribute and inspire one another. Sound evokes the emotions and the senses. It is a catalyst for our imagination. It can be combined with imagery for the purpose of communication, harmoniously or contrastively. Both have corresponding characteristics—color/timbre, brightness/pitch, length/duration, scale/volume, composition/rhythm—and thus provide ways of transforming each other back and forth as input and output. Computer technology has increased the ease of transforming and manipulating the two. In my thesis project, I explore sound visualization, sound/image transformation and combination.

Exploring Environments, Idil Cilingiroglu

Theses and Dissertations

My search for creative inspiration often leads to explorations in natural and built environments. Being physically immersed in an environment offers endless vantage points, as well as points of focus; allowing all senses to function as receptors of surrounding data. Observations stimulate thoughts and ideas, which inspire experiments. Projects are born, sometimes out of the smallest details. In a series of projects I explore the possibilities of using physical environments as primary source of inspiration and input in the creation of tools that function in design contexts.

Blue Book, Daniel Cole

Theses and Dissertations

Alain De Botton writes in The Architecture of Happiness, that “any object of design will give off an impression of the psychological and moral attitudes it supports.” Interpreting design then is done by understanding the attitudes of the designer, which either will or will not resonate with the viewer. I may consider the formal and conceptual merits of an object of design, but ultimately my attitudes determine whether the object will have resonance with me. These “attitudes” are, anthropologically speaking, values: what a person finds most good, proper, or desirable in life. Values are the key to the creation of …

Wanderings, Jetter Jorge Silva

Theses and Dissertations

While it implies aimless movement, the act of wandering is an act of discovery and can become a search for the unexpected. Wandering, as a metaphor for making, creates opportunities to work in ways where the final outcome is unknown. This can be accomplished by the creation of methods and instructions designed for wandering-the act of discovery. In the field of design, these ideas can be incorporated as methods for making that guide the design process in ultimately unknowable ways, resulting in products that bear little trace of preconception. The role of chance and indeterminacy as methods for relinquishing control …

Through Process, Mitchell Goldstein

Theses and Dissertations

At the core of any designer’s activity is the process they engage with to create design. Process is not only a way to get from an idea to a completed work, it is also what determines our attitude towards design. This is the place where both the design and the designer are created. The gray area between nothing and something is where we go to discover design, and in turn to discover who we are and what matters to us. In this thesis I am investigating the nebulous place between ideas and things, thoughts and artifacts, and being just a …

Material Meaning, Anne Jordan

Theses and Dissertations

The synthesis of old and new, analog and digital, and hand- and computer-based methods provides designers with an opportunity to work beyond the constraints of the computer and take advantage of the aesthetic effects that actual materials bring to visual communication. Designers who choose to actively participate in their process – bringing the aesthetic effects of working materially into the realm of the digital – will likely learn to reject an approach that relies too heavily on passive digital tools. Active participation in the design process can extend our creative vocabulary and humanize visual communication.

Aural Landscapes, Brandi Price

Theses and Dissertations

Music and design draw upon innate parallels concerned with the creation and existence of space. By acknowledging the roles of both the visual and the aural in my design process as input and output, I attempt to achieve a deeper understanding of my intuition as a visual communicator. I believe that the visual and aural are linked—existing harmoniously together. The collected works present ever-evolving ideas on visualizing the experience of sound.

Unseen, Sohee Kwon

Theses and Dissertations

Photography conveys informative data, aesthetic value, and a conceptual message very much like graphic design. In the hands of the photographer, the viewfinder of a camera becomes an editing tool. Editing by point of view, use of color and cropping determines a great deal about the communication made by imagery. In my creative project, I will explore photography as a means to generate form, concept, and content. As a result of this exploration, I expect to find new ways of approaching graphic design problems. My goal is to develop themes that combine aspects of photography and graphic design. Themes could …

Design By Accident, Mengfu Zhang

Theses and Dissertations

Accident is a metaphor for life. From an arbitrary point in time, we potentially preview the entirety of existence. There is a Chinese idiom called “ blessing or bane,” which implies that a misfortune may perhaps soon turn into a blessing. Focusing on accident as a design method implies making the best out of a bad situation. An accident reveals invisible circumstances and potentialities in the world, both familiar and unfamiliar. Looking into the unpredictable world, I can begin to release my control, take a breath, and see what might happen if I do not fight the situation. I am …

Crafting Authenticity, Allison N. Schumacher

Theses and Dissertations

Authenticity is what we want from the world around us, from others, and crucially from ourselves and what we make. As it relates to graphic design, I define authenticity as a perceived match between form and purpose. For the designer, its quality is found in the process of simultaneously developing a concept and crafting the design/object.

Modes Of Participation: Co-Creative Approaches To The Design Process, Carissa Henriques

Theses and Dissertations

This project explores the notion of participation within the graphic design and problem-solving process. Through projects using generative tools and collaboration, I explore ways to instigate controlled participation from designers and non-designers. I observe and document how the methods and means of participation affect the creative process during these projects.

Design For Conspicuous Transit, Peter Bain

Theses and Dissertations

My creative project explores design for transit advocacy; aimed at shifting a car-dependent society into one where transit helps meet climate change, energy, and land-use challenges. It incorporates my research into aspects of designing for transit, an understanding of urbanism in Richmond and New York, and an appreciation of planning.

Making Time, Christine Coffey

Theses and Dissertations

We are living in an age where the quantity of information has exceeded its quality. No doubt the digital and information revolutions have provided the world with countless positive improvements, but they have also increased the speed at which we live and work to the detriment of the heath of our world. This project explores ways in which designers can aid in an effort to slow down in order to reinvigorate a more sustainable graphic design product.

Typography As Performance: Bringing The Stage Into The Design Process, Ann Ford

Theses and Dissertations

Graphic design is historically a visual language consisting of text and image composed for the purposes of sending messages in print format. The voice of graphic design is typography—structuring and arranging letter forms into visual language. Over the past two decades, new communication formats such as motion and interaction have frequently been related to performance. My intention, however, is to explore how performance can influence typography in two and three dimensions, and even in digital environments.

Fundamentals In Nature, Andrea Quam

Theses and Dissertations

This project explores innovative methodologies for design education. It is an investigation of teaching design fundamentals in an outdoor classroom.

Argent Sound Recordings: Multimodal Storytelling, Matthew L. Klimas

Theses and Dissertations

ARGENT SOUND RECORDINGS explores the integration of visual, written and sonic elements to tell a story. "The Silver Bell," a fairy tale, is delivered through the internet – providing users an opportunity to experience and interpret a constructed narrative under the guise of an independent record label website.

Voice By Design: Experiments In Redistributing Media, Bizhan Khodabandeh

Theses and Dissertations

In this project I conduct two experiments in redistributing media power and reflect upon how successful they were. The experiments include a poster campaign specific to Richmond and a project dealing with educating people about guerrilla media techniques.

The Barbershop: A Photographic Documentation And Exhibition, Justin K. Howard

Theses and Dissertations

In this project I explore the environment that surrounds and frames my life experiences. Interests in form, architecture, vernacular typographyand community blend into a photographic documentation—communicating my perceptual experience of Richmond barbershops through public exhibition.

The Unwantables: An Exploration Of Visual Narrative, Marius I. Valdes

Theses and Dissertations

The Unwantables is a creative project that has evolved from my lifelong interest in and relationship with visual stories. To me the most compelling aspect of visual storytelling is "imagination". The author possesses the ability to create new worlds, interesting characters, and situations that can have the potential to communicate about any topic. My project explores visual narrative as a communication tool to explain the role of imagination in my life.