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Let's Get Hairy : Women, Body Hair And Stigma In Arts Education, Chaitra Bangalore

Masters Theses

A woman who is visibly hairy might be viewed as masculine, dirty, unprofessional, or as a radical feminist. There are variations on what it means to be a woman; feminine does not have to be synonymous with “hairless”. Body hair is a stigma because it is a physical characteristic that is undesirable and shamed when exposed.

Body hair as stigma can be explored in terms of creativity and pedagogy. How can creativity work to dismantle stigma? Talking about stigma gives one the chance to express themselves in a way that is exploratory, sparking new ways of understanding. Arts education already …

The Artist, The Object And The Meaning Between : An Exploration Of The Joys Of Incorporating Meaningful Objects Into Art Practice And Teaching Pedagogy, Sarah Leis

Masters Theses

The Artist, the Object and the Meaning Between begins by exploring the human motivation and delight in keeping physical ephemera, tokens, specimen, souvenirs, relics, etc. Material things can be tools to understand and interact with the world around us; a name for this is “Object-based Learning”. I use Qualitative and Arts-based research to make the case for object-based learning as a complement to digital resources. Though anyone may benefit from these practices, the focus of the thesis is the teaching artist and her opportunity to encourage in her students a rich experience of the three-dimensional in a world that seems …

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 …

Content-Aware : Investigating Tools, Character & User Behavior, Llewellyn Hensley

Masters Theses

Content—Aware serves as a platform for investigating structure, corruption, and visual interference in the context of present-day technologies. I use fragmentation, movement, repetition, and abstraction to interrogate current methods and tools for engaging with the built environment, here broadly conceived as the material, spatial, and cultural products of human labor.

Physical and graphic spaces become grounds for testing visual hypotheses. By testing images and usurping image-making technologies, I challenge the fidelity of vision and representation. Rooted in active curiosity and a willingness to fully engage, I collaborate with digital tools, play with their edges, and build perceptual portholes. Through documentation …

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 …

How To Become Ocean?, Elaina Runge

Masters Theses

A shifting viewpoint transforms into multiple perspectives to explore surface and depth.

By compressing time into an instant, or expanding a moment out in infinite directions, patterns reveal and obscure themselves.

A process that is both rational and intuitive emerges through the use of different systems to approach the unknown.

The ocean operates as a metaphor. The beyond guides the search of one who is tethered to the shore.

Plastic, linen, silk, elastic, glass, cellulose, protein: fold, curve, bend, distort, resist to create forms that are neither unfamiliar nor named.

Blue, blue-grey, blue-green, blue violet, azure, cobalt, sapphire, lapis lazuli, …

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 …

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 …

Art Loser, Laura Jasek

Masters Theses

In my work, I aim to historicize the mechanics of misogyny. Through appropriation and re- authorship, the work interrogates and exposes the discreet erasure of contemporary gender inequalities and the societal attempt to obscure the historical origins of these inequalities.

My thesis work has been focused on Frederick W. Macmonnies, a predominant beaux-arts sculptor responsible for many early-twentieth-century American fountains and monuments. Many of his sculptures were embroiled in controversy, on grounds ranging from their aesthetic competence to their alleged misogyny. Macmonnies’ staunch academicism ran parallel to the birth of modernism, effectively expelling his name from the contemporary canon of …

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 …

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.

Perceptual Alchemy, Evan Voelbel

Masters Theses

The farther we peer into the depths of human consciousness, the subatomic realm of quantum physics or the vast expanse of the observable universe, the more our notion of an objective physical reality or a predetermined, public, external world is challenged. With each new door we open, an entirely new set of questions is revealed. The world we perceive is never a direct representation, but even knowing how constructed our perception of an external reality is, are we capable of letting go of it? Through perceptual alchemy, my work probes the threshold between our constructed reality and the ‘external world’, …

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 …

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 …

Double Takes : Secular Magic & Empathic Vision, Lake Buckley

Masters Theses

This thesis examines the ways that a history of secular magic has shaped contemporary culture and design lexicons. It reviews modes of secular magic as design principles as well as the terms by which the meaning and value of these modes changed over time.

I carry on the legacy of magician filmmakers who thoughtfully questioned the material nature of their surroundings and tools in order to unearth new modes of visual experience. With film, delight drives invention which in turn strains vision and perception, requiring a certain collusion with the audience. My work celebrates the notion of the double take …

Fluid Solid : Can We Converse With Granite?, Patrick T. Beals

Masters Theses

This investigation seeks to detect sources of the quantitative granite anomalies through various methods and use available resources to allow for an immersive, qualitative, and perhaps didactic experience, which will build a conceptual foundation for design of the in-between spaces made by the negative form of granite architectures. This thesis is about timescales and lenses by which to view them in partnership. With lenses are assumed perceptions, ones that define the understanding of the object in the viewfinder of the landscape, and in this case, the timescales which will be addressed in the following three phases:

Phase 01 Background : …

Remediating The Garment Industry, Kellie Knight

Masters Theses

This thesis culminated from an interest in addressing the pollution by the dye processes of the textile industry on the Earth’s waterbodies. The first Phase of this thesis explored the globalization of the garment industry. The movement of production was tracked over time from the 1950’s when production occurred primarily in the United States and Europe to present day when production is worldwide. With the global spread of the industry came the global spread of its pollutants.

The second phase of the thesis investigated the functioning of the fashion industry itself to determine which process from production to distribution is …

Transforme : A Look At Sports Beyond The Gender Binary, Courtney Skabelund

Masters Theses

This work explores the next wave of athletes. Using speculative design, it questions institutionalized social constructs that many take for granted but that are a daily struggle for others. It looks to broaden the expressiveness and individuality of sport. Through careful consideration, research, and testing this thesis represents my views and ideas of how sport might evolve to represent the next revolution of athletics. Because without a gender revolution, the true ideals of sport will suffer.

Communicatronics, Adi Azulay

Masters Theses

Design in its nature is a future facing practice. But the future is hard to predict or often even imagine. So how are we as designer to approach these types of problems?

In this thesis I attempt a novel design methodology to derive insights and produce new interaction models for long range communication. The methodology, which can be applied to any topic, focuses on a study of the past. More specifically using experimental archeology, the practice of rebuilding historical objects in order to test functionality and viability of a hypothesis. For this project I learned how to send smoke signals …

Empowerment Of People Of All Abilities, Kasia Matlak

Masters Theses

For my thesis, I sought ways to redefine disability, by focusing on people with lower limb amputations. I focused on the most troublesome part of their daily interaction with a prosthesis, which is a socket. My primary concern was to improve the experience with it, as it is where prosthesis attaches to the body. I looked at disability, prosthetics, body image, identity, and loss. After an amputation surgery, people experience a grief that is comparable to the loss of a loved one. Historically, some people deal with grief by creating and performing rituals. Those rituals have proved to be helpful; …

P-Lax : Toys For Adults, To Play & Relax, Zhizi Liu

Masters Theses

Adults don’t play enough. There is so much emphasis on working and being productive in modern day life, but this can have negative effects—for an adult this can lead to high stress and a sense of guilt when one isn’t being productive. My mission is to help adults de-stress and take a break from work by reintroducing play into their day-to-day interactions. Toys for children are often used for educational purposes and to help enhance their creativity and social abilities; toys for adults can instead used to improve mood, and to help release pressure that is built up from everyday …

The Farce Of The Frame, Dominic Musa

Masters Theses

Both argument and joke, this series of works offers a critical inspection of the world. Characters trace their steps through the scene of each painting, questioning their place within the appearance of things. The central character is the artist-as-critic. Through this character, with his looming magnifying lens, we are implicated as readers of the faux world—an absurdist play intoxicated with scribbled lines, decorative patterns, and conflated histories—as we embark on a quest for an understanding of human existence. Emptied of any emotional concerns, the characters investigate the world they live in, searching for any indication of hope or a reason …

Embedded Processors On Fpga: Hard-Core Vs Soft-Core, Vivek J. Vazhoth Kanhiroth

Masters Theses

Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are integrated circuits (ICs) that can be reprogrammed by the consumer after manufacturing. They are based on a matrix of configurable logic blocks connected via programmable interconnects that enables the designer to quickly recreate hardware circuits. In the past, FPGAs were primarily used for prototyping and debugging purposes. However, with their increased popularity, many commercial products now incorporate FPGAs.

In the late 1990s, FPGA vendors introduced System-on-chip (SoC) devices that housed one or more hard-core processors and an FPGA fabric on a single IC to allow for more complex designs that involved hardware and software …

Effective Population Size, Demography, And Viability Of Eastern Massasaugas (Sistrurus Catenatus) In Southwest Michigan, Danielle R. Bradke

Masters Theses

As humans increasingly exploit natural areas, wildlife populations face a growing number of threats that often result in population decline and isolation. Small, isolated populations are vulnerable to extirpation due to both genetic and demographic factors. Yet, low detectability of many imperiled species often precludes the collection of population-level data important for assessing population viability and implementing successful conservation. The eastern massasauga (Sistrurus catenatus) is a cryptic pitviper that has been extirpated throughout much of its historic range due to agricultural conversion of wetland habitat and other synergistic threats. Consequently, this species is federally listed as threatened in both the …

Exploring The Relationship Between Athletic Identity And Career Maturity Among High Profile Student Athletes In Revenue Producing Sports Attending A Division Ii Institution, Renida S. Clark

Masters Theses

The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore the relationship between athletic identity and career maturity of high profile male athletes at a Division II institution in the Midwest. The study was guided by Donald E. Super’s (1957) career development theory. Participants were high profile male student athletes, who were currently enrolled at the institution and played a revenue producing sport (narrowly defined as men’s football and basketball). Semi-structured interviews were conducted that prompted participants to describe their experiences as high profile student athletes and how those experiences contributed to their athletic identity and career maturity. Findings suggest that …

Black Male Persistence Through Stereotypes In College, Taylor B. H. Boyd

Masters Theses

Stereotypes create threatening environments for Black males on campus causing social, psychological, and academic effects of Black male collegiate success. The theoretical underpinnings of stereotype threat and critical race theory drive this study and explain where stereotypes derive from and how they create threatening environments for stereotyped Black male collegians. In addition, this thesis seeks to break the deficit narrative surrounding Black males in college. In doing so, this study highlights how Black males persist through stereotypes and the threatening environments they create in both academic and social settings in college. The qualitative phenomenological research design captures the lived experiences …

Information Theoretic Eeg Analysis Of Children With Severe Disabilities In Response To Power Mobility Training: A Pilot Study, Joshua O. Usoro

Masters Theses

Studies have shown that self-initiated locomotion in infants and young children is paramount to developing motor skills, social skills, and visuospatial perception. Because children with multiple, severe disabilities are often not able to produce movement on their own due to limited motor control, access to a power mobility device may be vital to their overall development. This study extends data analysis from an exploratory study, and investigates the use of information theoretics in providing objective measures to characterize changes in electroencephalograms (EEG) as a result of power mobility training, and relates these changes to observed rehabilitation outcomes. Three subjects with …

Islam In Saudi Arabia: The Homogeneous Portrayal And Heterogeneous Reality, John Rogeberg

Masters Theses

The objective of this thesis is to apply commonly held statistics in the world of missiology regarding folk Islamic practices to the least likely country for such practices to be found, Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is believed by most to be the birth-site of an austere, strict, orthodox form of Islam, responsible for the nature and nurture (education, promotion, and financing) of Islamic extremism. Conversely, I posit that through tracing the development of Wahhabism and its current global influence on Islam, its literalist interpretation becomes a profitable tool for the student of anthropology, missiology, and cross-cultural studies to gain a …