Digital Commons Network^™

I Think We Have Some Connection Difficulty: A Review Of Architectural Vocabulary And Representation In Our Condition Of Remote Communication, David Waite

Masters Theses

The distance required to slow this pandemic created a need for Zoom technology in maintaining our economies of mental production and social closeness. Just like scientists examined the COVID-19 virus globally in its petri under the electron microscope, Zoom exposed our domestic interiors. This platform stitched together our personal existence into an infinite interior. To some extent this places Zoom attendees into a new space of vulnerability where the platform turns passive observers into active participants in a hyper self-aware virtual world where all are forced to share their fragile environments of everyday life.

While videotelephony software thankfully facilitated communication …

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.

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.

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.

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 …

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 …

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 …

Second Act Conversion Of The Mercado De Xabregas, João Santa-Rita

IntAR Interventions Adaptive Reuse

No abstract provided.

Under The Radar Joe Garlick On Real Estate Development And Equity, Elizabeth Debs, Liliane Wong

IntAR Interventions Adaptive Reuse

No abstract provided.

The Elephant Refuge 'Pre-Use' Vs ''Reuse', Heinrich Hermann

IntAR Interventions Adaptive Reuse

No abstract provided.

Appropriating Architecture Digital Graffiti As Temporary Spatial Intervention, Dorothée King

IntAR Interventions Adaptive Reuse

No abstract provided.

Being Architecture And Action From Descartes To Foucault, Barbara Stehle

IntAR Interventions Adaptive Reuse

No abstract provided.

Empowering Actions The Participatory Renovations Of A Shelter, Christian Campagnaro, Nicoló Di Prima

IntAR Interventions Adaptive Reuse

No abstract provided.

Free Speech Comes Home La Casa Del Hijo Del Ahuizote, Enrique Aureng Silva

IntAR Interventions Adaptive Reuse

No abstract provided.

The Past Embodied In Action, Laura Gioeni

IntAR Interventions Adaptive Reuse

No abstract provided.

Klan Kosova Resisting New Order, Astrit Nixha

IntAR Interventions Adaptive Reuse

No abstract provided.

We Are Never Not Inside Discrete Objects And Nested Interiorities, Clay Odom

IntAR Interventions Adaptive Reuse

No abstract provided.

Tactical Urbanism Where It Matters Small Scale Interventions In Underserved Communities, Sally Harrison

IntAR Interventions Adaptive Reuse

No abstract provided.

Everybody's House The Rosa Parks House Project, Ryan Mendoza, Fabia Mendoza, Diogo Vale, João José Santos

IntAR Interventions Adaptive Reuse

No abstract provided.

Temporary Acts The Decorators, Kristina Anilane, Luis Sacristan Murga

IntAR Interventions Adaptive Reuse

No abstract provided.

Watermarks : The Catalogue For Home Enthusiasts, Susana Oliveros Amaya

Masters Theses

Not just when tricks are revealed as tricks, but also when they become something else and materials still push one direction but then take a different turn. The wardrobe does not quite fit in your Ford Ka, the shelves are not exactly straight, the bed does not fit the mattress and the cabinets do not line up. The tension between ideals and use opens a space for re-appropriation, one that can reveal and turn its socioeconomic codes against themselves. Perhaps these are precisely the moments of friction when these ideological watermarks can be disrupted.

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 …

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.

How To Do Things With Things, Emily Guez

Masters Theses

Humans have always done things with things. It’s at the very origin of who we are as a species: we’ve gone from being bipedal homonins to people who live in complex societies by making rocks into tools. Things can serve a practical function, but they also carry cultural and symbolic meaning: they can tell our personal stories, allow us to connect with each other, and be the outer manifestations of our inner lives. The things we use in our every day lives, by implying a set of actions we can take when interacting with them, participate in shaping our reality: …

Living Under Surveillance, Fan Jia

Masters Theses

Our first impression about surveillance will always likely relates to with advanced technology. However, advanced technology is the means that only awakens our consciousness of surveillance but is not the birth of surveillance. It has been embedded in our lives in our lives all the time for generations. Before the age of technology blooming, surveillance was carried out by the human eye, and this mode continues always. My thesis starts from our daily relationships, and analyzes how surveillance happens around us within those relationships and people interactions.

This thesis proposes a surveillance system in a specific city: —Washington D.C., which …

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 …

Beautiful Dirt : Exploring The American Taboo Of Death Through The Things We Leave Behind, Jake Dangstorp

Masters Theses

‘Beautiful Dirt’ is a project meant to help people think about death as a way to learn and grow, rather than a ‘never happening’ taboo. Contemporary research into western dialogues around death show a consistent anxiety towards being forgotten, as well as a fear of being a burden when passing away. The abject nature of the topic leaves people diminishing the weight of the things they leave behind, and the things they forget to. This perpetuates a cycle of denial in order to avoid stress, emburdening loved ones with an unplanned mass of personal items and piecemeal stories to assemble, …

Body Of Work, Oliva De Salve Villedieu

Masters Theses

This yellow book filled with short stories, indexes, and a bright body of work, is a little bit rebellious, a little bit scandalous, but mostly self-indulgent. It is an invitation to release, unhinge, and get, consensually, tied up. Here graphic design is not a thinking tool, but rather an attitude—a desire to engage and skew. It is a place where affection translates into practice and lifts an eyebrow to modernism. The work is one of contrast; it contradicts and plays. By excavating simple systems for complex reasons, it deconstructs the fundamental primaries of graphic design and recontextualizes them by holding …

Cosmosis, Angela Torchio

Masters Theses

Cosmographies deal with the order of nature. They are general descriptions of the universe, and this thesis is a cosmography, dealing with visual content, constraints, and the complexity of symbolism.

Visual experience is dynamic, interrelated, and inherently tied to a value hierarchy. On a micro level, design is my way of understanding the world, while on a macro level, it is a tool to generate new perceptual structures for engaging with, not merely seeing, design.

The work is based on the idea that multiple symbolisms are inherent to all things, and these symbolisms will shift based on context. Cosmographies are …

Interface Philosophy, June Yoon

Masters Theses

During a Grad Studio II crit in the spring of 2018, I presented my project Measurements of Space and Time (page 132) and right after I finished, someone said, “This is like interface philosophy.” I didn’t even know what that meant, but it just felt right. At that very moment, I knew Interface Philosophy would be the title of my thesis.

Interface Philosophy was built as much as it was written and designed. Its function is to define “interface philosophy.” To describe interface as a meeting point for communication; philosophy as a cognitive reasoning of structural patterns. What I have …