Art and Design Commons^™

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 …

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 …

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 …

Squishy Play, Lauren Traugott-Campbell

Masters Theses

Work is part of our identity and dictates how workers spend most of their time in the US. This obsession has truncated our imagination and ability to conceive of alternatives. As a tactic to reclaim free time, I offer a practice I refer to as squishy play in which participants momentarily adopt new social norms to collectively discover new ways of engaging with the world and each other.

I use squishy play as a lens to investigate the power structures, social norms, and material output of late capitalism in the US. Squishy play is generous in its frivolity. It is …

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 …