Digital Commons Network^™

Of Dolls And Jewels : Keeping As A Strategy Of Care And Belonging, Yuqi Fan

Masters Theses

In this thesis, I will discuss the psychology behind object attachment in the doll-keeping subculture by integrating doll language into contemporary jewelry. I researched the Chinese term “Pi” as an accurate way of explaining how doll-keepers are attached to their dolls. In this 21st century, the widespread use of social media and AI technologies have deepened people's reliance on virtual spaces, leading to emotional detachment in our society. Adopting the concept of “Pi” into contemporary jewelry, which encourages a shift in focus towards external objects, the practice of doll-keeping becomes a form of self-care that compensates for our current loneliness …

Al-Naseej: A Woven Path, Dalal M. Almazeedi

Masters Theses

This thesis explores how art and adaptive reuse can transform abandoned buildings in Kuwait City into vibrant cultural and artistic hubs that honor the nation’s tribal and artistic heritage and bridge the gap between past and present. Through repurposing these neglected spaces, Kuwait can preserve its historical identity while creating homes for contemporary design and creativity. This transformation revitalizes urban environments, and fosters a sense of belonging and community by integrating heritage with contemporary artistic expression. This project envisions the transformation of “The Old Amiri Hospital” into an artistic cultural hub that celebrates the traditional craft of Al-Sadu weaving, merged …

Soft Stickers, Alexandra L. Croft

Masters Theses

The United States has long maintained an extractive relationship with national forest land, leaving a dwindling number of old-growth forests and an overabundance of young, small trees. Waste byproducts of the industry, such as sawmill offcuts, are typically burned or chipped for groundcover; but what if they were reconsidered as viable building materials in their own right? Opting for stuffed and strapped connections over conventional notches and nails, Soft Stickers proposes a building ethos that accepts and accounts for material variation and dimensional change over time through supple materials and a long-term maintenance commitment. Green wood offcuts dry and shrink …

Prosthesis, Alexander A. Grosek

Masters Theses

This thesis explores the hospital as a prosthetic—a structural and spatial support for the human body in moments of vulnerability. Like a crutch or cast, the hospital temporarily supports patients in their transition from horizontal (infirm) to vertical (mobile), yet its architecture often fails to contribute meaningfully to that healing process. While clinical treatment is prioritized, the spatial, emotional, and sensory dimensions of care are neglected. What supports what becomes a central question: the building holds the body, but the body also gives meaning to the building. Their relationship is reciprocal.

Rather than proving that good design improves health—an idea …

Foundations Of Belonging, Yerim Jang

Masters Theses

In the early 1900s, hundreds of thousands of immigrants displaced by World War II sought refuge in the United States, drawn by the promise of a new life and the hope of finding community in an unfamiliar land. To navigate the challenges of a new country, these immigrants formed ethnic social clubs that provided essential support, including housing, employment, and spaces for social connection. Over time, as later generations assimilated and established new identities, these once-thriving social hubs diminished, barely operating their original functions and transitioned into bars, event halls, or restaurants. Since the early 2000s, a new wave of …

The House At The End Of Time, Gyles Jose Antonio Ferrao

Masters Theses

This thesis investigates the architectural potential of thresholds as spaces of psychological and metaphysical transformation, positioning the edge not as a boundary but as a generative spatial condition. Drawing upon Carl Jung’s conception of dream architecture as a symbolic map of the self, the project proposes a nonlinear exploration of architecture through layered references that operate across metaphysical scales. The house becomes a medium through which the liminal is made tangible, a temporal and spatial construct that blurs the binary oppositions of life and death, memory and forgetting, reason and absurdity, consciousness and the unconscious.

The project conceptualizes architecture as …

Gradiance: A Mindfulness Intervention, Kip Geddes

Masters Theses

People in cities live life at a fast paced forward march that results in a mental state called ‘hurry sickness’. This prevents them from living in the moment, which often leads to a disconnection to those around them. Mindfulness techniques have been proven to increase people’s levels of happiness and openness to the people around them. However, many people are too busy to practice these methods. My thesis looks at ways for mindfulness to intervene into their established routines. Illumination has been shown to promote mental well-being, either in therapy lamps, or circadian rhythm based lighting; the liminal spaces that …

Patchworks - A Design Framework For Repairing Systems, One Patch At A Time., Jack A. Martinez

Masters Theses

Design interventions for social good often fall short—ineffective at best and harmful at worst. Even successful projects tend to have fleeting impacts. Despite prototyping, innovation, and scaling expertise, designers struggle to create lasting community change. Skills that drive capitalist markets remain underutilized in the social sector. Reducing barriers to entry in the design for social good field might foster a more equitable, service-oriented design practice.

This thesis examines how designers can collaborate ethically and effectively with community organizations to support their missions. It examines the challenges and benefits of applying a ‘patchwork design approach’ to social good through real-world partnerships. …

Time Reclamation, Yuming Hu

Masters Theses

In today’s involution culture or “internal competition”, epitomized by China’s 996 work schedule, time is tracked like a quota rather than lived. Drawing on Camus’ call to make one’s very existence a quiet act of rebellion, this thesis answers alienated time with multisensory design.

Four interventions, the Thermochromic Table, Blinds Light, Dappled Shadows Light, and a haptic Squeeze Timer, using temperature, light, shadow, and touch to stage brief “moments of awareness.”

Instead of urging users to optimize every second, these objects invite them to pause, feel, and enjoy time. Each prototype softens the clock’s rigid tick into a gentle cue, …

Covered In Snow, Katelynn M. Rogers

Masters Theses

Covered in Snow is a photographic exploration into the ripple effect of maternal loss and environmental decay in my hometown of Canton, Ohio. In the wake of a miscarriage, the woods I had grown up within began calling to me, urging me to return. Unbeknownst to me, a series of accidental deaths of women had been happening throughout these trees my entire life, their stories only coming to the surface as I looked to the trees for solace. This series of inexplicable deaths in the woods I so desperately loved began to alter my relationship to the trees, a distrust …

Field Journal: The Excluded Middle, Carrie E. Kouts

Masters Theses

What does it look like to engage with organisms and landscapes at the periphery of anthropocentric value structures? How does one break the internalized myth that the “built” environment is excluded from the natural world? When does a hyper-mobile and hyper-commodified society confront the exponential crisis of animal death? Within this series of journal entries, field notes, collection observations, weird prose, and sensory musings, one will find questions on the nature of being human and the complex narratives of care we encounter in a world shared with more-than-humans. Each handwritten vignette and photograph from daily life weaves a non-linear and …

Site-Specific Nurseries: Reconnecting Nurseries To Time And Place Through Ecotypic Bare-Root Production, Tryn Collins

Masters Theses

We surround ourselves with empty landscapes, landscapes that are stagnant and decorative. Lawns edged with cultivated non-native species are inert spaces, devoid of complexity and serve little function beyond their appearances. These spaces that symbolize wealth through controlling nature are in fact the end of nature. Most of us are completely unaware of the intricate webs of life, the ecologies, that are our real habitat, hidden under the concrete and turf, pushed to the edges of our developments. They are relationships established over thousands of years between plants, insects, animals, weather and soil. This kind of complexity scares us, it …

The Portals: Jewelry As A Site Of Escape And Solace, Jung Ki Min

Masters Theses

This thesis investigates jewelry as a medium for emotional escape and psychological refuge, offering multisensory alternative forms of escapism. Rooted in personal experiences of continuous change and instability, the work explores how imagined spaces—constructed through AI-generated and digitally assisted visuals and layered material processes—can serve as intimate sanctuaries. Drawing from psychological theories, surrealism, and escapism, the study positions jewelry as a portable interface that enables temporary retreat without full detachment from reality. The series of work, which integrates transparent acrylic, visual layering, and subtle dimensionality, materializes these imagined spaces into wearable forms. These pieces invite reflective engagement, allowing wearers to …

The Terror Of The Threshold: On Impermanence, Enclothed Hauntology, And Rest, David M. Legrand

Masters Theses

My artistic practice explores the intersections of impermanence, enclothed cognition, necropolitics, and rest as intertwined acts of decolonial resistance. Through a studio practice rooted in transient mediums—charcoal, chalk, and erasure—the work confronts neoliberal and anti-Black demands for coherence, productivity, and permanence. The ephemeral drawings, layered and dissolved on my studio walls, embody a fugitive aesthetic inspired by Édouard Glissant’s “right to opacity[1],” rejecting colonial logics of legibility and commodification. These impermanent gestures mirror Haiti’s silenced revolutionary history[2], as theorized by Michel-Rolph Trouillot, while invoking Vodou’s vevè symbols as counter-archives of survival.

Enclothed cognition[3] is reimagined …

Gamifit, Sishu Wu

Masters Theses

How can we make fitness feel more like raising a pet than checking off a chore?

Gamifit is a playful system that helps beginners build exercise habits by blending AR fitness pets (Fitimals) with a simple physical reminder device (The Dock). Instead of tracking numbers and steps, it focuses on emotional motivation—your Fitimal eats, rests, and grows based on your workout consistency. Skip too many days, and they might get sick... or even leave.

This project uses gamification to bring short-term joy into a long-term challenge, creating a softer, kinder fitness journey—one that feels fun, forgiving, and actually worth sticking …

The Limits Of Knowing: Determinism, Uncertainty, And What’S Beyond The Human Gaze, Xilong T. Zhang

Masters Theses

This essay traces a personal philosophical and artistic journey from rigid belief in scientific determinism to an evolving embrace of uncertainty, subjectivity, and computational perception. Raised in an atheist, scientifically grounded household in China, the author initially adopted Newtonian determinism and Laplace’s thought experiment of a fully predictable universe as guiding principles. These beliefs informed early artistic practices rooted in Constructivism, geometry, and rule-based aesthetics. However, a failed attempt to fully optimize life through deterministic control led to physical and mental collapse, prompting deeper exploration into Cartesian dualism, quantum mechanics, and the limits of reason. Through Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and …

Building Ecologies: Maintaining Land, Working With Wood, Taylor Jais

Masters Theses

This thesis critiques contemporary architecture and building practices for their fundamentally unsustainable and place-less assemblies that rely on extracting finite resources that generate significant emissions while simultaneously neglecting to consider the needs and existence of humans and non-human species with in the built environment. Through experimental material research that diverts “wood” waste streams and integrates land and multispecies care, this work demonstrates how maintenance-based approaches to construction can transform built assemblies into ecological systems. By deconstructing wood to its cellular components and recombining these elements in novel ways, this research reveals possibilities for collaborative, materials-driven, place-based building practices. This thesis …

Mapping Our Tears: Risd Cry, Yimiao Wang

Masters Theses

RISD CRY is a participatory project empowering the RISD community to share their experiences of emotional vulnerability. The project includes physical sign-in forms in campus facilities, a Google Doc sign-in form, illustrations of participants’ comments, and an online campus map where individuals can mark where they have cried. This multi-format engagement fosters community connection, challenges the stigma surrounding emotional expression, and provides a platform for solidarity among individuals facing stress and burnout.

Beyond its tactical goals, RISD CRY also interrogates the cultural frameworks through which emotional struggle is perceived and processed. It critiques the institutional impulse to measure, diagnose, and …

The Sixth Interface: The Integration Of Drone Infrastructure With Low-Altitude Landscape, Shicheng Tang

Masters Theses

This project focuses on the design of outdoor vertical space in Hong Kong in response to the development of China’s Low-Altitude Economy. It explores the integration of these spaces with drones. Through site design and planning, the project uses existing rooftops, parks, and public plazas to create multi-functional drone infrastructure. These spaces enable low-altitude logistics while providing additional social benefits such as public recreation facilities. These landscape enhancements create a harmonious synergy between technology and ecology.

Central to this work is the concept of “The Sixth Interface”, a new spatial layer between the ground and the sky where drone-driven flows …

Eco-Posthumanism — A Utopian Transformation Of Modernist Residence, Shuli Wu

Masters Theses

The Eco-Posthuman Manifesto, in this thesis, serves as a framework for spatial transformation within the context of the Anthropocene. As of 2020, the weight of human-made matter has surpassed all living biomass. This shift is both material and symbolic. It exposes the consequences of human-centered development and calls for a rethinking of architecture’s relationship with life, time, and ecology. Taking the Barbican Estate as a case study, the thesis proposes a 100-year transformation, shifting the site from a concrete, human-optimized housing complex to a living biome shared by humans, non-humans, and embedded technologies. Through design strategies such as Miyawaki afforestation, …

Space, Life And Capital: The Metabolic Rift, Zhongsu Cheng

Masters Theses

The recent avian influenza crisis exposes the fundamental contradictions of capitalist spatial production. By compressing life into optimized enclosures, industrialized poultry farming has effectively transformed these spaces into "laboratories of viral evolution" breeding grounds for zoonotic diseases in the pursuit of maximum efficiency. This crisis is not an isolated event but rather a spatialized metabolic rift: the logic of capital disrupts natural cycles, accelerating ecological and systemic collapse. At the heart of this crisis lies a critical architectural question: If capitalism organizes and encloses life within space to maximize value, can architecture be reimagined not merely as an instrument of …

The Dialectic Of Airless Space, Ophelia Arc

Masters Theses

The Dialectic of Airless Space is a cumulative, cross-disciplinary research project that explores ‘airless space’ as a somatic and psychological condition shaped by institutional environments. Unfolding over time through five interrelated books, the project weaves together writing, ephemera, textile sculpture, and drawing to archive the invisible architectures of bodily and mental experience.

Unnatural Nature: A Visual Artist’S Reflection On Myth, Medium, And Feminine Being, Rong Xu

Masters Theses

My artistic journey has been guided by a childhood fascination with mythology and how our ancestors interpreted the natural world. As my practice evolved toward digital media, I began questioning what "nature" truly means—is it an objective reality or a construct filtered through cultural lenses and personal experience?

The transition from traditional to digital tools—from physical brushes to Apple Pencil and Wacom stylus—removed much of the spontaneous dialogue with materials that once mirrored nature's own randomness. While I initially celebrated my ability to simulate traditional techniques digitally, I now recognize this transformation demands a fundamental reconsideration of how artists connect …

Embodied Archives, Emerging Futures, Xuân-Lam Nguyen

Masters Theses

Fifty years after the end of the U.S.–Vietnam War, this thesis reflects on the entangled relationship between the two nations, inspiring hope while challenging dominant representations of trauma and tragedy. Drawing from autobiography, family history, folk art traditions, colonial photographs, hierarchies within art history, archives of student activism, and key geopolitical events, the work explores the complex intersections of queer identity and glitchy historical narratives. Combining research-based inquiry with time- and labor-intensive processes, it reimagines historical materials to construct alternate possibilities for the future.

Where The Ocean Ends, The Mountains Becoming, Yuchen Wang

Masters Theses

The father figure casts a long shadow—both a scaffold and a snare. Inherited silence, latent anger, and the fear of being seen are unspoken legacies that bind me. I move within a structure he built that promised protection yet enforced obedience. There, love was often inseparable from control.

This work emerges from the fracture between resistance and inheritance, between the instinct to escape and the compulsion to remain tethered. The paternal presence is no longer a person, but rather a system—an architecture of power and repression—that continues to influence my gestures, choices, and silences. Even distance fails to sever the …

Restoring Qi In Urbanism: Restoring Spatial Connectivity And Energy Dynamics Through Landscape Intervention, Jiaqi Pan

Masters Theses

This thesis explores how Taoist “Qi”, a dynamic energy flow, can provide a productive lens for approaching contemporary landscape architecture.

Taking the ancient city of Tai’an in China as a case study, I analyze the historical changes made to its Qi network at the urban scale. This draws a carrier theory that Qi could be examined by water connectivity and spatial porosity. Thereby, I further establish the dynamic network relationship between landscape factors and Qi.

Blending ancient philosophy with modern ecological thinking, I proposed Qi carrier theory for healing Qi ruptures in urban landscapes. Through design in White Horse Village, …

Pulped Landscapes, Allison P. Abrams

Masters Theses

Large corporations control intensive and extractive industrial land use practices through acts of dumping, capping, and neglect. The abandonment of industrial sites is increasing as well as the environmental consequences of such actions. How can impacted communities proactively engage in remediation processes while post-industrial sites sit in limbo?

With the former Foley Cellulose Plant in Perry, Florida (closed in 2023) as a case study, this thesis researches and speculates on potentials of phytoremediation experimentation and harvesting of plant fibers on contaminated soils. The site is a pulped landscape: land directly impacted by intensive, large corporation-led pulp production practices that is …

Graphic Gestures On The Digital Surface; In Defense Of The Observational, Soyoung Ro

Masters Theses

This thesis offers a subjective and process-based exploration of digital tools, challenging the dominant function-driven mindset that often defines digital design today. Rather than prioritizing speed, efficiency, or usability metrics, this work is a shift in focus toward experience, spatial awareness, and the subtle dynamics of interaction.

Rooted in acts of attention—looking inwards, looking outwards—this approach begins by setting aside assumptions about what tools are for, in order to ask how they shape our behaviors and ways of thinking. In doing so, it proposes a design methodology grounded in presence over productivity, process over execution, and agency over automation.

The …

Vampyres Reimagined, Madison Marie Strand

Masters Theses

This thesis explores the intricate interplay between imagination and reality in fantasy literature, encapsulated within the first ninety pages of my novel, A Ruin of Memories. It is an explorative contribution to the genre, with themes of mental health, loss, and belonging in an environment that morphs reality with the supernatural.

The artist statement serves as a reflective insight into my creative process and personal journey as a writer. It outlines my motivations for crafting A Ruin of Memories, rooted in my desire to paint a picture of spiritual warfare through the lens of vampyres, werewolves, and witches. Through this …

A Phenomenological Study On The Effects Of Graded Performance Evaluations On The Longterm Musical Engagement Of Students In Malaysia, Qianxi Lim

Masters Theses

This qualitative transcendental phenomenological study aimed to research the effects of graded examinations, such as the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music (ABRSM) and Trinity, on the musical engagement of students who have taken private music lessons. Graded examinations are widely used in Malaysian private music studios, and most music teachers and students use the examinations as the primary source for music education. Participants shared their demographics, experience with graded examinations and private music lessons, and current musical engagement through an online questionnaire on Google Forms. Eight Malaysians who have taken private music lessons and graded examinations were …