Digital Commons Network^™

Terminal: Through The "Windows" Of A Tram Car Museum, Yuyi Si

Masters Theses

The typical city museum is more concerned with the city’s past: focused on founding myths or historical events. The content is frozen and lacks engagement. Simultaneously, the city itself develops rapidly and shifts, just as the citizens move and change. To address this disconnection, it is necessary to create an active city museum that joins place, memory, and people by putting museum learning in context throughout the city and engaging audiences in their daily lives.

Dalian in Liaoning Province, China, is recognized as a historical and tourism district with a unique city fabric and collection of architectural styles. The city …

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.

Ritualizing Of Space In The 21st Century: Fostering Of Communal Identity Through Celebration Of Tamil Culture, Mridula Swaminathan

Masters Theses

South India is known for its traditional belief systems and the numerous architectural manifestations of these beliefs. The scale and extravagance of temples and the palaces for the kings are an example of how important culture and ritual were in the past. Now some of these structures, such as the Thirumalai Nayakar Palace in the city of Madurai, the cultural capital of Tamil Nadu, stand in a modified societal context with no cultural or ritualized significance. Moreover, the host of this project, the Thirumalai Nayakar Mahal, situated in a city brimming with multiple sacred rituals performed along the city streets, …

Beyond Pasta: Understanding Italian American Culinary Culture In Federal Hill, Chufan He

Masters Theses

Nuances of culture are lost from an outside perspective. This one–sidedness perception brings confusion and can lead to stereotypes. As a “Country of immigrants’” it is crucial to break stereotypes born in America to understand the complexity and uniqueness of every immigrant's culture. As for stereotypes of Italian culture in America, these are always related to food. As an Italian American neighbourhood with many layers of history, Federal Hill has experienced several transitions. At the beginning of the 20th century, the Fabre Line offered the only transatlantic route which brought a large number of Italian immigrants to New England. Providence …

Beacon Public Library: Expanding Radical Civic Care For An Uncertain Future, Katrina Machado

Masters Theses

Stressors like climate change will put strain on our communities, making them more vulnerable. I am asserting and expanding the role of the public library as a civic space for radical care and community resilience. This work explores the ways in which the public library, as an existing institution, could adapt to the needs of its changing environment and community. Interventions are visualized by a librarian’s jumpsuit and library apron, an adapted library book cart, public signage, and a re-imagined library card.

I imagine a public library that pushes the bounds of its physical building and actively and compassionately serves …

Integrating The Latin American Villancico In Baroque Music History Studies, Linssey Ma

Masters Theses

The Baroque Villancico is a popular genre in Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula that reflects a history of musical and cultural intersection. Chapel masters composed an extensive work of sacred villancicos to perform in Cathedrals during religious ceremonies and festivities. In the twentieth and twentieth first centuries, the Latin American Baroque villancico has been a growing interest by many musicologists. J. Peter Burkholder, author of the current eighth edition of the Norton Anthology of Western Music and ninth of A History of Western Music, addresses the existence of the villancico which has never been mentioned in previous textbooks. Integrating …

“Venerated For Their Bloody Deeds” English Medievalism In Literature, World War I Aviation, And Memorials, Levy Walton Pait

Masters Theses

Aviators of World War I were trailblazers of the sky. That much is certain. However, there has been a historical debate about their reputation as “knights of the air.” During the war and for many years afterward, World War I aviators were compared to medieval knights battling in honorable duels amongst the clouds. This was an idea popularized by the pilots themselves. David Lloyd George, British Prime Minister during World War I, described pilots, “‘They are the knighthood of this war… they recall the legendary days of chivalry not merely by the daring of their exploits but by the nobility …

Loyalist Preachers During The American Revolution (1765-1783), Christena Renea Leaverton

Masters Theses

“Loyalists were those who remained loyal to the British Crown and did not support America’s fight for independence leading up to, and during, the American Revolution. Being loyal to the crown was the normal practice for all Americans prior to the increasing call for independence.” In the time leading up to and during the American Revolution (1765-1783), Loyalist preachers defended their stance on remaining loyal to Great Britain utilizing Bible themes and specific verses. Oftentimes, as with the Patriots, these Loyalist preachers took these themes and verses out of context or misquoted them. They also used Bible themes and verses …

Outcomes Of Music Improvisation Experiences: A Scoping Review, Julia Mccarren

Masters Theses

Music improvisation is a therapeutic music intervention utilized frequently by board-certified music therapists in various clinical settings. While music therapists frequently use music improvisation as a treatment intervention, research on music improvisation outcomes is limited. The purpose of this scoping review is to summarize current knowledge about the outcomes of music improvisation experiences in music therapy and non-music therapy contexts. This review aims to identify and address gaps in the literature to provide suggestions for future research. The findings of this review will inform clinical music therapy methods. To conduct the scoping review, the researcher used the following five-stage framework: …

Lawful Violence: The Relationship Between Marriage And Conflict In The Wars Of The Roses, Hannah R. Keller

Masters Theses

England’s King Edward IV married Elizabeth Woodville in 1464. Edward’s sister Margaret of York married Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, in 1468. Both marriages occurred during England’s fifteenth-century conflict, the Wars of the Roses. And both created conflict between Edward, Richard Neville, the Earl of Warwick, and France’s King Louis XI. Most historians regard this conflict as either a sign of or product of disorder. I, however, argue that both marriages could have been a calculated form of “lawful” violence known as disworship used to damage the political capital of Warwick and Louis and thereby instigate war with France. …

Cultural Acupuncture: Decentralization And Deocratization In Chinese Exhibition Design, Ruohan Duan

Masters Theses

There is an imbalance between the opportunities for aesthetic education in big cities and underdeveloped areas in China. Taking Shanghai and Beijing as examples, museums in big cities consume most art educational resources. People who live in rural or small towns hardly have access to the arts, making the aesthetic gap larger between cultural centers and cultural deserts.

This thesis proposes a new exhibition system that could send a series of accessible and sustainable exhibition structures around China to narrow the educational resources gap and synchronize cultural curriculum between different places. Decentralizing and democratizing the cultural center and bringing the …

In Service Of _____; An Inclusive Architectural Collage Practice, Blair Ramsey

Masters Theses

This Thesis asks these questions: who do we serve as architects, what does engagement with marginalized communities look like, what tools and methods are used to represent this process and these communities, and overall, how can architects create safe and inclusive space?

Collage is the critical mechanism for how this work is done and how I wish to practice in the future. Collage is used for documentation, representation, communication, and participation. All in the hope of designing a space with and for the queer community. Vital to the work is the idea of sampling from an existing image-based media that …

Personal Positioning System, Laura Diez De Baldeon

Masters Theses

Personal Positioning System (PPS) is an exploration of spatial memory in an unstable world. While the GPS gathers many different, shifting data points in order to provide us with an apparently stable representation of our position, a longitude and latitude in the earth’s grid, PPS offers alternative forms of mapping based on a more flexible unit: memory. PPS reverses the directionality of the GPS and returns to the fragmentary; it disperses rather than unifies, offshooting in different directions, overlaying the intimate on corporate territory, chasing the shifting flow of geographical information. It conceives of design as a spatial practice, one …

Becoming A Precipice: The Liminality Of Queer Cruising, Chance Deville

Masters Theses

In “Becoming a Precipice,” I am analyzing queer cruising areas as psychological landscapes from a queer, non-binary perspective, counter to heteronormative conventions. These landscapes are important to me, as being a full participant in this culture is my main form of sexual interaction. My inquiry is prompted by the need to interpret how this specific form of desire molds itself into visceral responses and manifestations of performative masculinity. Entering the cruising landscape itself increases awareness and intensifies the senses, in a space where signals become critical in determining transactions with other individuals beyond spoken language. These somatic reactions are uniquely …

Community, Harana & Karaoke: Towards A Theatrical Design, Ryan Diaz

Masters Theses

Community, Harana, & Karaoke: Towards a Theatrical Design explores graphic design’s potential as theatrical staging for building community and practicing the difficult and complicated art of loving others through performance.

Studying graphic design as harana, the traditional Filipino custom of romantic serenade, offers a framework to view both mediums as social architectures that propose and transform proximities of relation between people. As in harana, graphic design facilitates in naming, grounding, and organizing social relationships; in taking these affective environments as content and form, both arts align with the nature of performance and staging. Through practice, research, and abstraction, the graphic …

Imaging "Interracial": Performing Racialized Desire In "Interracial" Heterosexual Hardcore Pornography, Megan Christiansen

Masters Theses

“Interracial” is a term that implicitly categorizes sex between Black cis men and white cis women within contemporary hardcore pornographic video. The artistic and research practice described in this paper is located in, influenced, and driven by pornography itself as an important entry point for thinking about racialized desire.

Looking with care and criticality at the pornographic representation of sex between Black men and white women can allow us to think about how issues of gender and race are key in constructing notions of desire and taboo in America. Through this work I begin to consider how racism and misogyny …

Inside Out: Rethinking Contemporary Chinese Art And Global Creative Economy, Tiange Li

Masters Theses

This thesis is to destabilize the Western dominant understanding of contemporary Chinese art when it circulates on the global art market, such as the all-to-common narratives only celebrating Chinese artists who are politically criticizing or resist the Chinese authority. Meanwhile, I also question the authority control inside of China, especially the mainstream criteria of aesthetics and art. Cultural anthropologist Aihwa Ong observes that some Western scholars believe contemporary Chinese art to be “crass opportunism with reduced aesthetic value.”Chinese American artist and art critic Chen Danqing criticizes contemporary Chinese art from the last ten years as too utilitarian: “During the Cultural …

Fostering Cultural Understanding: Mirroring Ways Of Living In Providence, Ri, Usa And Beijing, Prc, Jiarui Tina Wu

Masters Theses

Over the last several decades, the relationship between the US and China has suffered twists and turns, rooted in different ideologies and social foundations. The Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent surge of anti-Asian violence in the US contributed to the exacerbation of this global controversy, triggering an undeclared Cold War. However, in history over hundred years, there was a real dialogue between the US and China through business trade. The high classes in the US were used to buy Chinese export commodities, such as luxury furnitures and porcelain, and similarly, Chinese merchants bought American goods, which caused naturally lead to an …

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 …

Remembering Chinatown: A Fusion Of Food, Identity, & Memory, Robert Yang

Masters Theses

In 2016, the Chinese American Restaurant Association recorded a total of 50,000 Chinese restaurants operating in the United States, far exceeding the number of McDonalds, Burger Kings, KFCs, and Wendy’s combined. In the near two centuries that Chinese people have been a part of the American fabric, our food has become one of the country’s most popular ethnic cuisines. While these restaurants stand as testaments to the tenacity and entrepreneurship of the Chinese immigrant, they are also reminders of the centuries of adversity Chinese Americans have endured. The racial divisions triggered by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 have resulted …

Solastalgic Ecotone: The Critical Zone In Suspension, Bareeq Bahman

Masters Theses

This thesis explores the concept of critical zones of the shoreline to study the littoral ecosystem as a mechanism to unfold multi-scalar approaches to land-water interfaces. The investigation of the littoral is used as a tool to further understand the ground and situate it within wider landscape conditions. It focuses on the zone from the desert to the sea, its natural processes and its many layers that make it into a productive eco-infrastructure, here read through the lens of a critical ecotone where all living organisms interact. A lexicon curated from the study of the ecotone is developed to work …

The Second Identity: The Human-Otters Ha-Ha - Utopia For Urban Animals, Yuxin Zhang

Masters Theses

The question of proportion between humans and urban animals is always existed but had been ignored for a while. Through COVID19,the early balance, which human as a dominant sign in the urban area seems been slightly broken and many “invisible” animals start to show up. This makes me think that is there another living mode between humans and animals.

The thesis project locates in Singapore. Asa country around by water, Singapore has countless river canal, with some of the rivers are more residential and quieter, some are famous hot tourism point. However, some of the rivers are similar, which because …

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 …

Martyr (In Exile), Xinyi Mei

Masters Theses

Xinyi Mei (meimei) is an image maker. She looks to make assessments on the moments when consilience is woven through viewing and limited imagination. She also uses images to examine the precarious state of identity flowing between the individual and the collective. She usually practices with video installation, photography, and writing.

Fossil Morphology, Leah Zhang

Masters Theses

Fossil Morphology is a multi-media art project based on my research on the coal mining area in East Pennsylvania. It consists of a film, a series of photographs, and a sound installation. Together, the three works form a dialog among each other about the ecology and aesthetics of the region’s coal mining landscape and its underground.

For a long time, coal, as an raw material for mass production, has been understood and examined from its economic values and social meanings. The gradual abandoning of this material by our industry therefore leads to the seemingly inevitable decline of the coal mining …

Indefinite Origin: Decentralizing Knowledge, Tong-June Moon

Masters Theses

The RISD Digital Commons notes that “graduate education is focused on producing original contributions to a field, based on research and advance practice."

What is collaborative thesis, and what value does it bring to the process?

Indefinite Origin, is a thesis advocating for knowledge to be decentralized and treated as a shared resource. Deviating from a focus on originality, it engages in the creation of knowledge as a collaborative effort. Design flexibility is practiced through intellectual humility, negotiating methodologies and welcoming chance. This thesis explores ideas from Furtherfield’s Do-It-With-Other (DIWO) or Do-It-Together (DIT)4 philosophies that promote synergy around commons5, cultural …

Transforming Islands: A Living Memorial For The Marshall Islands, Chengwen Jiang

Masters Theses

Does Utopia exist? If so, I believe it is a state of mind, a way of thinking. This thesis speculates on future uncertainties. As such, my work punctures an illusion, examining history to reveal underlying tensions and, finally, conceive a brighter future for the Marshallese. Using the Marshall Islands as a case study, this thesis examines how a population might face traumas, both historical and climactic, and demonstrate how new infrastructures can build resiliency to support minorities and create new memories. My proposal introduces two potential “visitors:” Marshallese people ( future generations as well as indigenous) and the rest of …

Virtuality, Reality, Community, Siqi Rao

Masters Theses

With the popularization of the Internet and the development of technology, virtuality has penetrated into our lives and has taken up an increasing proportion of our time. However, while bringing convenience and benefits, virtuality also brings many problems, such as polarization, radicalization, cyber violence, and social isolation. In the face of these problems caused by virtualization, this thesis studies the importance of the sense of place in a community and uses some virtual technologies to enhance real-world relationships, working to alleviate problems caused by virtualization. At the same time, it explores the role of virtual tools in shaping the sense …

Community Steward Of The Deep Bay: Staging Lau Fau Shan For Resiliency Through Collective Participation, Lauren Tam

Masters Theses

This thesis explores tensions of utopian ideals through the lens of stakeholders living and working in the Deep Bay coastal region of Hong Kong, Using Lau Fau Shan as my case study, I have worked on ways to build socio-ecological resilience through bottom-up strategies of community engagement through first hand experience of interacting with a local oyster farmer. In understanding how the different forces of climate change and development pressures are currently impacting the community and the daily workings of the fishing community, my goal is to demonstrate how design can advocate for the importance of community driven strategies to …

Defining The Diva: Celebrity, Feminism & Performance In Popular Culture, Rachel Glago

Masters Theses

The word ‘diva’ tends to conjure a specific kind of woman. As popular culture has come to recognize ‘diva’ as a more politicized term, it’s essential to acknowledge that the intrinsic meaning of such a term in this context comes from a patriarchal culture that strives to control women’s bodies, identities, and individual narratives as they’re represented in the media.

Through analysis of Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, and Jennifer Lopez’s careers in the music and entertainment industry, this paper explores this notion further while considering the implications of gender, race, ethnicity, and age. These case studies analyze the shifting relationship and …