Digital Commons Network^™

Making Common, Elaine Lopez

Masters Theses

Making Common sets conditions for communication around cultural diversity and inequality. Through my practice, I create new ways to share, honor, and celebrate the stories that have been neglected for too long due to white supremacy, patriarchy, and other forms of structural oppression. I create immersive graphic design experiences that challenge people to question and expand their worldview. This methodology models an alternative way for designers to work towards a more just society

Standards, Rules, Setting, Robert Mcconnell

Masters Theses

Greetings. Welcome to Standards, Rules, Setting. This short preamble serves as a user guide to the material that follows. It is, essentially, a set of standards that govern the organization and progression of the various items in this publication.

Everything in this book has been conceived and constructed in line with the Graphic Design Thesis Book Protocol. As my body of work deals with the communication of messages and the manipulation of their governing conventions and norms, this publication — as well — has been organized along similar principles.

There are five types of components in this thesis book: sections, …

Framing Questions And Modes Of Inquiry In Illustration Process And Critique, Robert Brinkerhoff

Faculty & Librarian Work

Every creative act begins with a question—whether consciously or unconsciously formed—and illustrators may enhance their approaches to visual problems by framing a line of critical inquiry that invigorates conceptualization. While inventories and lists of questions are suitable ways to begin, there exist many different modes of questioning—verbal and non-verbal, manual and cognitive, linear and discursive, intuitive and rational, integrative and deconstructive. This chapter explores diverse methods for inquiry in problem definition and resolution, describing a variety of models and incorporating observations by professional artist-educators to expose different strategies for illustrators.

Decolonizing Design, Repair, And Mapping Indigenous Futures | A Conversatoin With Tristan Schultz, Liberal Arts Division, Risd Museum, Ncss Graduate Program

Nature-Culture-Sustainability Studies (NCSS) Lectures

Lecture, March 21, 2019. 6:30 pm, Metcalf Auditorium, Chace Center/RISD Museum. In this discussion, Tristan Schultz will discuss his work with the decolonizing design group. He will also discuss his research on repair and maintenance as radical eco-design strategies and consider the role that indigenous futuring could play in expanding our understanding of sustainable futures.

Tristan Schultz is a Lecturer and Convenor of Visual Communication Design in the Design Futures Program at Griffith University, Tristan is an Australian/Aboriginal interdisciplinary designer, strategist and researcher with a Master of Design Futures (Hons) and PhD Candidate. Recent research has focused on how design …

A Guide To Thesis Book Design, Marcus Peabody, Center For Arts And Language

Thesis Writing

57 pages. "This guide is more basic and specific than other design manuals. Used in isolation it should tell you all you need to produce your book, even without prior graphic design knowledge. It could also be a starting point for a deeper dive into book design: other manuals that deal more thoroughly with elements such as book binding or typography are mentioned along the way for further reference." – from the introduction. "This book is set in Brandon Grotesque and Miller Text. Written and designed by Marcus Peabody (GD MFA 2019). Edited by Jen Liese and Meredith Barrett (A&L). …

2019-2020 Risd Course Announcement, Risd Registrar's Office, Risd Archives

RISD Course Catalogs / Announcements

No abstract provided.

Recent Publications, Editorial Office

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

No abstract provided.

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 …

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 …

Constellations, Maria Rull Bescós

Masters Theses

In this book you will find a collection of projects that both reflect and simultaneously reinvent my personal way of seeing the world, which I consider to be a space that is complex, diverse, and in continuous transformation.

Graphic design is the lens through which I examine and understand this complexity, and it is also the medium through which I translate this huge realm into navigable systems of ideas, tales, forms, and experiences.

I have been inspired to produce my own systems in response to those I discover through actively observing my environment (territory), reflecting upon my personal background (origin), …

Anachropomorphism!, Carson Evans

Masters Theses

Folks, the Truth is hard to know—if can be known at all.¹ Conventional Western wisdom tells us: stick to the facts. (I’m looking at you, Enlightenment.) We privilege the written word as an objective and reliable vehicle for communication. Useful, yes, but we over-rely. I counter with this: bodily performativity and purposeful inaccuracy that produces, paradoxically, narrative accuracy. These methods roil in our gut or tug at our heartstrings—instead of recoiling, we should embrace them.

I like to unpack “the stories we tell ourselves,”² our personal and societal mythologies, with a particular eye to how the past plays a role …

2018-2019 Risd Course Announcement, Risd Registrar's Office, Risd Archives

RISD Course Catalogs / Announcements

No abstract provided.

The Broadsheet September 29, 2017, Students Of Risd, Risd Archives

All Student Newspapers

The Broadsheet was a short-lived student newspaper published in 2017. The September 29, 2017 issue features articles on an "ethical consciousness post-Trump," improving critiques, the US pulling out of the Paris Climate Accords, the Social Equity and Inclusion Action Plan, the smoking ban at Kennedy Plaza, statue conservation, new programming at the library, an offensive incident involving a graphic designer and a sign language interpreter, and other items of interest.

Art-Integrated Pedagogy For English And Chinese Language Learners, Regina J. Kuo

Masters Theses

The purpose of this research is to identify how art-integrated teaching methodology might help learners to absorb contents more effectively than the traditional teaching methodology. There are many schools in the U.S. started to use art-integration multimodal approach in school curriculum on different academic subjects. This research focuses on the art-integrated pedagogy in linguistic language, especially for English language learners and Chinese language learners. The researcher approaches the subject with illustrating a collection of personal cases about art-integrated pedagogy used in teaching and learning environment. This art-based research produces two teaching materials designed to answer the questions that were frequently …

Habitually, Sunha Joo

Masters Theses

This book is a journal of the conscious looking into my most unconscious behaviors. I documented and observed my unconscious habits, and tracked where they originally came from. Observing myself was both the process and the result of the work. I played a triple role throughout the process. I was an object, an observer, and a conduit. I wrote and became a subject of the writing. I used various forms, styles and voices in this book to align the work experience of these constantly changing roles with the writing experience and to embody different perspectives.

As a result, this book …

Unbound 2017 Exhibitor Biographies + Collection Descriptions, Risd Unbound, Fleet Library

2017 Print

No abstract provided.

2017-2018 Risd Course Announcement, Risd Registrar's Office, Risd Archives

RISD Course Catalogs / Announcements

No abstract provided.

Editorial, Editorial Office

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

No abstract provided.

Live Edges: All Possible Adjacencies, Rebecca Leffell Koren

Masters Theses

Edge is a deceptive word. It suggests lines, borders, designations—a kind of certainty. I see edge instead as a porous adjacency—the noise at the intersection of planes that adds meaning, rather than separation. Live Edges is a design research practice that is hyperobservational and multi-planar. Equal parts training ground and methodology, what began as an effort to derive graphic form from the intangible qualities of place developed into an approach to parsing complexity.

Setting locality as my origin point, signifiers of place—materiality, behavior, orientation, architectural form—serve as catalysts for graphic response. I interpret landscape in order to construct my own, …

Practice Makes Practice, Gabriel Melcher

Masters Theses

Graphic Designers today must operate independently of specific tools and media. Modes of production are democratized, and so it is in the ways we choose to operate within these modes that define the value of the field. Practice Makes Practice is a response to this condition, refocusing attention from the products of design as endpoints of process to visual evidence of persistent questioning by the designer.

Through my work I question roles and media, enfolding audience, client, and collaborators into my process. My practice is improvisational, quick, and performative in its response to the specifics of site and circumstance. Through …

Form, Content, And Form As Content, Bon Hae Koo

Masters Theses

Form, Content, and Form as Content demonstrates form as a tool of communication used to explore the role of aesthetics, play, and order in giving form to design. This thesis maps the journey of an aesthetic critic who makes visible and explicit the structures and symbolic meaning valued in the graphic forms we experience.

The practice draws upon the properties of the kaleidoscope, rearranging form to produce new content that questions the reliability of standards, from corporate ranking to color palette trending. Bearing witness to culture, I closely observe and highlight identities and trends that command high stakes in culture. …

Speculative Politics -Fictionalized Spectacle, Prin Limphongpand

Masters Theses

Speculative Politics—Fictionalized Spectacle posits an alternate model for design practice. Borrowing from the genre of science fiction, this design approach activates consideration of possible realities and cultural forms. It raises questions and invents problems instead of solving them. By imagining technologies, policies, laws, and conditions that do not yet exist, design becomes an agent of investigation to highlight current and future social, cultural, and political conditions.

The projects within this thesis reconsider our present situations through methods of speculative documentation. The act of documentation becomes a process of manipulating notions of truth to render fictions from reality. Using subversion, instigation, …

Objects In Mind, Leah Kenttämaa-Squires

Masters Theses

Daily distractions and interruptions are abundant and often cause anxiety, irritability, and impatience. The world is constantly in a battle for our attention making it difficult to be in one moment. Our continuous motion of both body and mind to combat these constant disturbances cause us to lose perspective, become quick to make judgments, and unable to recognize errors. We no longer take time to fully consider where our thoughts are leading, nor do we allow for a moment to let our thoughts go.

An object can promote open-minded thought by altering our perception or perspective of it, preventing automatic …

Multiple Influences: From Witnessing Language To Performing It, Viviane Jalil

Masters Theses

5The relationship between language and tools has always been one of influence. Our devices—pens, keyboards, smartphones—make language visible and affect its form and structure. But this exchange goes both ways: all acts of reading and writing are mediated by our expectations of content, and the instruments used to access it.

As modes of communication evolve, so too do the ways in which we think through language, creating a dynamic of perpetual adaptation. With the growing impact of technology upon our behaviors, this dialogue is becoming imbalanced, affecting how we engage with others, how we approach our machines, and how we …

2015-2016 Risd Course Announcement, Risd Registrar's Office, Risd Archives

RISD Course Catalogs / Announcements

No abstract provided.

Techstyle Haus., Architecture Department, Jonathan Knowles, Ryan Abendroth, Jacquelyn Albano, Sina Almassi, Allison Chen, Kim Dupont-Mainier, Helen Bergstrom, Ludwig Rongen, Robert Schild, Derek Stein, Felicitas Bach, Sascha Emmert, Timur Kolsuz

Legacy

Techstyle Haus is an international student collaboration that has designed a solar-powered passive house with high-performance textiles. The first Solar Decathlon entry to incorporate a complete textile enclosure, it seeks to challenge conventional architectural practices and approach homebuilding with a fresh perspective. The team includes representatives from Brown University, Rhode Island School of Design, and University of Applied Sciences in Erfurt, Germany.

Not Not Real : Exercises In Styling, Sophie Mascatello

Masters Theses

As a generative process of visual form, styling and artifice are co-dependent. Styling mediates visual and sensorial elements for aesthetic benefit, and artifice produces a fantasy otherwise unattainable. Together they are a rebus — an orchestration of symbols and shifted realities — that impacts modes of representation and subsequent shifts in taste.

In Not Not Real, the logic of “real” life is moot. Relevance and subjectivity are the only fixed parameters that govern stylistic intuition. The image produced — however candid or authentic it may appear — is artificial. But this imagery supersedes reality in provoking aspiration, rendering the …

Reconsider Everything, Hyunjin Kim

Masters Theses

This thesis is composed of three overarching chapters that exploit conventions as a tool to reexamine our social and cultural habits. Observing commonalities in our everyday experiences, this body of work explores subjectivity of rules of convention, questioning assumptions and common values.

In the first chapter, "Formal Conventions," I observe formal qualities and definitions of existing objects and explore alternative meanings and the performance of form. In the second chapter, Limits of Vision," I look at imperceptible subject matter to explore limitations of default modes of human perception. In "Boundaries of Techniques," I search for possibilities of expanding graphic design …

Risd Xyz Fall/Winter 2014/15: The Body | Full Issue, Liisa Silander, Risd Xyz

RISD XYZ Fall/Winter 2014/2015: The Body

"LOVE THEM, HATE THEM, feed and obsess about them as we do, our bodies are our interface with each other and the physical world. They’re the often astonishing and perpetually intriguing vessels that hold who we are. When you think about the body in the context of art, it’s almost impossible to separate one from the other— just as it’s impossible to separate the body from considerations of health and health care. They’re all inextricably intertwined. . .". From the editor's message by Liisa Silander

Mechanical Reproduction In An Age Of High Art, Chris Barker

Contemporary Aesthetics (Journal Archive)

This paper reopens the question of the place of high art in the period identified by Walter Benjamin as the age of mechanical reproduction. Walter Benjamin, Bruno Latour, and Adam Lowe are wrong to think that mechanical reproduction has transformed the concept of art, destroying the aura of art or transmitting that aura from original to copy. The concept of art cannot be redefined by the modern change in the capacity to reproduce art unless art was initially defined primarily by its uniqueness/nonreproducibility. Photographic reproduction has caused major changes in the visual arts and in the way we consume art, …