Digital Commons Network^™

Identity Production, Boyang Xia

Masters Theses

What are we talking about when we talk about identity? People are likely to define themselves in terms of what is relevant to their time and place, in other words, context. This indicates that identity is not a fixed definition, but more of a malleable construction; it develops its attributes via context. I am constantly recalibrating the relationship between the two. Context is ubiquitous, unnoticed, coexistent and interchangeable. Identity is reflexive, fragmented, shapeable and fluid. Identity Production explores and unveils how identity is adapted and manifested in contemporary conditions, as well as its external validation which paradoxically defines this indefinable …

Otra Vez : Hierarchy As Designer, Jordyn Alvidrez

Masters Theses

Methods of hierarchy are often represented in graphic forms. They shape our world into subjective places/spaces of belonging or oppression. The need for order is a human condition. There is constant tension between the utility of ordered systems against the manipulative and ultimately subjective manner in which they are created. Where there is a system, there is a story. The narrative the hierarchy tells is just as crucial to me as the mechanics.

I position myself within various hierarchal systems as a way to understand the logistics of their becoming, but also, to manipulate (or justify) my cultural and ethnic …

Wayfinding Streetscapes : How To Integrate A Wayfinding System Into The Streetscape, Improving Public Transit And Pedestrian Mobility, Lu Zhang

Masters Theses

This is a thesis investigation in 3 phases, integrateing wayfinding system into streetscapes by effective spatial planning and environmental communication, aiming to improve public transit and pedestrian mobility. Considering streets as one of the major sites of city life, they play a critical role in the process of daily information flow and communication. This entire thesis tests the possibility of adding a new layer into streetscapes as both a city infrastructure and a method to raise people’s awareness towards a certain site.

The Untold Tale, Yan Zeng

Masters Theses

Inspired by Manchurian heirlooms and family traditions, I create intricate textiles as narratives that viewers can empathize with, vehicles for expressing my own memories and cultural background. I have told many stories through my textiles in the past, but my thesis tells a very special one: it is a story that I have been afraid to make known for nearly 20 years, a dark fairy tale based on my childhood traumas and experiences; it is the story of a girl who was lost in a deep forest and struggled to find a way out. My thesis collection is composed of …

Talistones : A Handful Of Help For Homecoming Soldiers, Atulya Changanty

Masters Theses

We are creatures of habit influenced by our environments. We function on a 24-hour clock known as our circadian rhythm that is dictated by the solar cycle, seasonal shifts, and our daily schedules to determine our understanding of time to que our behaviors. The circadian rhythm can be disrupted by trauma to the brain, shift in lifestyle and habits, or inability to determine the passage of time and can lead to profound effects on mental health. Soldiers who are transitioning out of military service into civilian life, particularly those who have experienced combat, are an archetypal population who encounter damage …

Impractical Community, Zixin Xiong

Masters Theses

Zixin lost her phone and she went on a journey with a girl to find it. During the journey, they collected cellphones to let these machines get a good rest; they explored a sandwich city and took a risk to follow an insect who ate people’s profiles. They were trapped in a forest of lies and heard about lots of silly questions, etc. After experiencing these weird adventures, Zixin found a new friend underground and dove into a magic river to live with her.

The Impractical Community is a magic realist fiction that reveals the disadvantages of our technology in …

Retooling : Experiments In Digital Apprenticeship, Ryan Ferguson

Masters Theses

Over the past decade, rapid advancement in the fields of artificial intelligence and machine learning has led to an abrupt shift in the skills we designate as “human” and the skills we delegate to machines. This shift can be characterized, to some degree, by the transformation of tacit knowledge–knowledge that is difficult to transfer or quantify, into explicit knowledge–a language that machines can both understand and act on. An adjacent surge in democratized education platforms has made it possible for anyone to begin learning a new skill. Mastering a skill however, especially hands-on skills, often requires a level of tacit …

Dermis, Julia Betts

Masters Theses

I create situations that hold onto spaces or things. That psychic energy can be transferred to a viewer. I’m curious about this transference and The Aesthetics of Disengagement and the empathetic nature of making work.

I often engage the viewer through overwhelm (such as: texturally, amount of objects, length of performance, mark making…) to create anxiety/tension around a body or around how a body relates to space. To create this overwhelm, I use ritual, repetitive labor that is between obsessive and meditative. In this boundary, I wonder about whether art is healing or can be. I’m interested in creating spaces …

I Am Come Back To You, Eleanor Tomlinson

Masters Theses

Through various forays into psychological science and affect theory, this work attempts to understand how quick and simple commodities might coalesce into a complex portrait of individual and collective memory.

How Long Can You Hold Your Breath?, Felicia Leroy

Masters Theses

I began freediving, a sport in which one dives as deep as possible on single breath hold, as a way to approach the inaccessible space of the deep, to expand my understanding of the unobtainable.

This space (the deep) seemed to me to be representative of something that is totally unknown, its power existing in its inaccessibility, in its un-know-ability.

Through training/experiential data collection and using human physiology at depth as a framework, this thesis work book explores a single breath hold to the other side.

Work made in support of this exploration touches on darkness, depth, the edge, the …

A Theatrical Life : Negotiating Biracial Identity, Timothy Lai

Masters Theses

My paintings and drawings use autobiography, fiction, and theatricality to examine biracial-identity formation and the negotiation of different cultural ideologies. The personification of these ideologies in narrative accounts pose questions to which the characters must answer and respond. This leads to humorous, sad, problematic, empowering, and chaotic compositions that become an intimate chronicle of my own endeavor to find those “perfect” answers.

In my practice, painting and drawing are ways to explore a broad range of topics that stem from personal and familial stories. Using allegorical personifications, symbols, and metaphors derived from my family, I see the home as a …

Every Change, Ruhan Feng

Masters Theses

After being away from home for six years, distance and time make me reconsider: “Who am I?”

This thesis is an honest memoir, which records my reflections about life through my struggles, confusion with cultural identities, and conflicts with my mother in a one-child family. In a two-year graduate program, I continue to explore my identities as Chinese, an international student, an expatriate, and a daughter.

The text, accompanied by illustrations, interprets personal artistic changes. Printmaking in my work is not just a tool to make multiples. The ideas of layering and repeating are also applied to my three-dimensional installations …

Cultural Infrastructure, Public Space, And The Contemporary Library In Toronto, Zoë Ritts

Masters Theses

Public space is an aggregate of differences, a place of exposure and adjacency to other lived social realities. The potential of public space is the confrontation or mediation of differences through interaction.

Public spaces are therefore about intersections and visual transparency between publics. Through architecture, we can create the conditions for contact with difference: with openness, transparency, density of program, and merging and splitting trajectories, we can work toward greater engagement in society.

As civic institutions, the bus station, an affordable method of transportation and movement, and the library, a crucial component of cultural infrastructure, can collide to create a …

Resilience On Wall Street, Rahul Ghera

Masters Theses

On October 29th, 2019, the most substantial economic depression of the modernized world abruptly began, as the international financial market and the global GDP took a plunge. Over the course of the next decade, all that continued to rise were unemployment and suicide rates.

The Wall explores the question of what happens when the lights go out on a society that is irrevocably halted. Questions of responsibility, reparations, and conviction are all weighed as ‘Wall Street’ is revealed as ground zero, and the once-powerful bankers are uncovered as the addicts who have gone too far, gambled too much, and are …

Naturally Occurring Form, Margaret Kristensen

Masters Theses

I am trying to find art in my body, attempting to create images that personalize and desexualize the nude. Between the body of images that we have access to via social media and the images we have seen of female nudes, emphasis is put on finding the form to be within western society’s acceptable range of beautiful; so rarely do we find organic figures existing in the photographic environment.

Having been taught how to photograph the body by looking at images of women taken by men, I don’t see myself. The photographs by Edward Weston and Irving Penn look, gaze, …

Re-Structure : An Exploration Of Relational Engagement Through Objects & Object Making, Mark Epler

Masters Theses

Home is a loaded concept. For each of us it means a vast spectrum of associations, emotions and values. However, there are also a myriad of universal commonalities of what home is in our collective imaginations and experiences despite the increasingly transitory and elusive ideas about what home means for each of us. Whatever or wherever we might call home, our experiences within the walls of what we understand to be home impact and shape us. It is the physical and sociological structure that shapes our lives and the shelter from which we depart to grow into the larger world …

Scripting Allographs, June Shin

Masters Theses

Scripting Allographs* examines typographic principles and their pervasive impact on ways of seeing and making through design. This body of work demonstrates the many faces of typography and type design and the way they inform allographic thinking. It employs type as the primary tool and medium for scripting possibilities, embracing their differences, idiosyncrasies, and imperfections. Beginning with a focus on close observation of small details and ending with an approach that invites and celebrates variability, this thesis offers a glimpse into a design practice from the lens of a typographer, type designer, and educator.

Creating Access And Equity In Arts Education : Strategic Partnerships For Systemic Change, Colleen C. Andrews

Masters Theses

Creating Access and Equity in Art Education: Strategic Partnerships for Systemic Change examines the diminished state of art education in United States public schools, reveals how nonprofit arts organizations supplement what is lacking in the current educational system, and offers current examples, based on interviews, to place these issues in context. A history of the National Endowment for the Arts and an examination of arts funding, both public and private, provides a backdrop for the weakened state of the arts in schools. Exploring educational policies such as No Child Left Behind and the Every Student Succeeds Act reveals how federal …

Between Thoughts : On The Interconnectivity Of Things, Yunzhu Wang

Masters Theses

My furniture designs are sensory tools that offer a bridge between our mental world and the physical world. With a strong belief in systems of interconnectivity and equilibrium, I use my designs as tools to calibrate awareness to the flow of changes that occur as enduring undercurrents in our everyday lives. Using as stimuli basic mechanisms of measurement as well as sensory cues, my works are antennae to our perception, inviting finely-tuned attention to the subtleties of response between our body and the physical environment. In the process of our participation, we come to see the dynamics of action and …

Living Rooms We Don't Live In Anymore, Caroline Kable

Masters Theses

During my time at RISD, I have discovered terms and theories such as defensible space, socio physical phenomena, the Savannah Hypothesis, Christopher Alexanders Intimacy Gradient. All of these things have been amalgamating into a defensible argument to the intuitive feelings I’ve had my whole life, and have been attempting to imbue into my work. If anything, my thesis body of work is one next step in a lifelong pursuit of discovering what is it to live- how to define and manipulate the intangible bounds of human life and experience; of the millions of tiny moments and decisions that make up …

The Emotional Intelligence Of Machines, Lokesh Zope

Masters Theses

Technologies today claim to be capable of detecting human emotion. When such technologies appear on our everyday objects, how will our interactions be like? Can these objects know when we are frustrated with them? Wouldn’t that radically change the field of user experience design? However, would people be scared of such capability?

Born from this curiosity, this thesis project is a speculative and an experimental approach that explores the overlap of the fields of User Experience Design, Affective Technologies, and Artificial Intelligence. This exploration is aimed at investigating its need and illustrating a newly designed adaptive nature of domestic appliances. …

Love View, Wudi Hong

Masters Theses

There are many kinds of love, but for some people, romantic relationships are the most meaningful element of life, providing a source of deep fulfillment. I am designing a new service to track, rethink, and improve relationships with people who move to a new environment and are separated from loved ones or for those who are in unsatisfactory relationships. People in long distance relationships lack physical interaction and the ability to share feelings daily. I am working towards designing a digital service and accompanying physical tools which aim to strengthen and maintain close personal relationships across distance for people.

Body (Less) Fitness, Dan Gioia

Masters Theses

It’s too cold outside. You stubbed your toe. You had too much Chipotle. You didn’t have enough Chipotle. There’s no shortage of reasons to abstain from exercise on any given day.

Designing a product or system to get someone to exercise is almost anti-design. So much of design is making things seamless and easy for whomever your user may be. You want to make it easy for people to accomplish things they want to do. But designing to get someone to exercise? You’re trying to get someone to do something unpleasant. You’re asking your user to sweat, strain, exert, and …

Embracing Traditional Chinese Culture Through Design, Jiaxuan Li

Masters Theses

As a designer from China I am constantly focused on my passion for design of China, This interest comes from both my commitment to deep-rooted Chinese traditions, and my concern with regards to the gradual loss of traditional cultural values within contemporary society.

As a product designer, I really like designing daily object, through exploring the relationship between consciousness and behavior. I consider this connection in order to make objects more meaningful to users.

This project discusses the current situations of Chinese traditions and cultural values, and the challenges they face to survive in the contemporary world. My mission is …

Developing The Cartooning Mind : The History, Theory, Benefits + Practice Of Comic Books In Visual Arts Education, Cathy G. Johnson

Masters Theses

This thesis by cartoonist and educator Cathy G. Johnson explains why cartooning should be taught in visual arts classrooms. The theme is supported by historical research, professional inquiry, child development research, and analyses of pedagogical approaches. Johnson traces the history of the U.S. comic book industry from its beginnings during the Great Depression, through the anti-comics movement of the ‘50s, male-dominated comic shops of the ‘70s, and the eventual Japanese import comics boom of the ‘90s. She uses the personal narrative of her engagement with comics as a child in the ’90-‘00s as a case study to explain the current …

Design Syncopations, Mary Yang

Masters Theses

Design Syncopations is an inquiry into space and intervention. Central to this work, is the orchestration of scenarios to prompt visual, auditory, and physical engagement. My background as a musician strongly informs this practice as I borrow from and disassemble musical structures—time, rhythm, composition, and counterpoint. Through designed prompts and invitations, I incorporate musical themes of chance and improvisation, setting up programs, altering spaces, and interrupting existing conditions. Working at the intersection of sound and design allows me to conduct audience-led musical performances, reprogram gallery spaces, and collaborate with artists and musicians. The ensemble of works adds up to a …

Poetic Features Beyond Functions, Lu Xu

Masters Theses

As a designer I am trying to find words to adequately describe concepts, processes, materials, contexts, characteristics and characters. The words do not come easily. I can recount the whole making process and material make-up. I can place it into a historical and cultural context. I can list the functions and features. But when a design is intuitive and inevitable, words can only give some slight whiff of the idea. A design just exists. It exists by communing with our senses; it exists by being done; it exists by somehow winding its way into our hearts and minds.

Bodypart + Object, Creama Wong

Masters Theses

This thesis is about exploring the possibilities of combining objects with physically realistic body parts. This book is just the beginning of a whole new fantasy.

Building As Reef, Anna Morataya Quan

Masters Theses

We are in a new era, one that will require the most radical transformation that coastal communities have seen yet. Starting mid 21st century, subsequent generations will be witness to a time in which sea level rise manifests within the urban fabric, not only in the form of storm surges, but also in an increasingly permanent manner within the projected floodplain. Rising tides will create a shift from solid ground plane to a fluctuating one. Encroaching sea levels will bring marine life and hydrologic conditions that the built environment hasn’t been designed or prepared for. Urban circulation, infrastructure and ultimately …

Our Measured World : A Poetic Translation, Minryung Son

Masters Theses

Twenty-seven years alive. Sixty-one inches tall. One hundred forty-nine days abroad. How many more units would it take to describe me? What value is derived from this quantification? What quality of understanding does it offer? As human beings, we are constantly measuring our lives and implementing systems of standardization. Throughout history, measuring systems have served as frameworks for our comprehension and navigation of an increasingly complex world. This thesis approaches measurement as a means of revealing and processing this complexity of human experience rather than one that merely simplifies and distills. Through the lens of graphic design, my translation of …