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 …

'Manch' Beyond - Museum, Dhwani Bapna

Masters Theses

In contemporary India, the museum remains a symbol of cultural prestige, yet according to national cultural surveys, fewer than 1% of Indians visit museums annually, a statistic that reflects not only structural and spatial exclusions, but also psychological barriers shaped by class, language, and institutional codes of conduct. These institutions are far from neutral: they embed expectations about how to see, move, and behave, privileging a didactic framework. In the absence of intimacy, dialogue, and belonging, the museum becomes a space visited, not inhabited.

Rather than viewing space as a container for artifacts, this thesis reimagines space itself as an …

Comfort In Contradiction, Yanchen Zhao

Masters Theses

This research explores why modern visual experiences often feel hollow—why suburban McMansions imitate classical architecture and why luxury spaces feel staged. Instead of simply criticizing these aesthetics, I want to understand them: Why do we embrace symbols disconnected from history? What makes them feel familiar and comforting?

Using Jean Baudrillard’s idea of hyperreality and Marshall Berman’s view on modernity, I examine how today’s aesthetics are simulations—designs that no longer refer to a real past but exist as self-repeating symbols. Everyday objects borrow classical decorations without structural purpose, offering a sense of tradition and familiarity without real historical connection. Modernity, while …

Ourcraft, Jie Wang

Masters Theses

Industrial-era transportation infrastructure not only bears witnesses to technological progress and urban development, but also carries collective memories and occupies central location in our urban fabric. Traditional urban renewal often tends to tear down and rebuild, but this approach ignores the inherent spatial value, cultural significance and potential contribution of buildings to community networks. As the original function of many such structures fades, they increasingly become physical and social barriers within the urban fabric, hindering interaction and cohesion between communities.

Gamification integrates playful spatial elements and interactive experiences, attracting local residents for leisure and engagement. Gamification, broadly defined, is the …

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 …

Afrography: Scripting Futures Anchored In Culture & Community, Osmond Tshuma

Masters Theses

Latin and Arabic are the most used writing systems in Afrika, not only because of their functionality but because of colonial history. Colonialism established Eurocentrism as the standard, while Afrikan creations were marginalized and demonized. This thesis investigates various ways of reclaiming identity through typography using the concept of Sankofa, which emphasizes retrieving and learning from the past to build the future. By integrating cultural objects into designs and everyday visual language, we can challenge and reverse the demonization imposed on Afrikan symbols by colonial narratives.

The belief of Ubuntu, the philosophy that an individual’s well-being is intrinsically tied to …

Immersive Stillness In Poetic Space: Textiles For An Uncertain World, Dora Hyunjung Kim

Masters Theses

In an era shaped by environmental crises, the erosion of seasonal rhythms, cultural uncertainty, and the accelerating pace of technological shifts, this thesis explores how textiles—through their tactility, atmosphere, and quiet presence—can serve as vessels for meditative and emotional spaces, which I refer to as "poetic spaces." In the midst of countless unpredictable variables and a rapidly evolving cultural landscape, there is a growing need for environments where silence and quiet reflection can unfold. Within this broader context, poetic space functions not merely as an aesthetic concept, but as a vital site for emotional grounding and inner restoration.

This research …

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 …

This Is How To Shoot A Gun., Rene Camarillo

Masters Theses

The textile work I have developed for my thesis is a curated exposing of the social interactions and violent phenomena of underprivileged realities. It investigates the theatrics of community violence, mechanisms of survival both through labor and bullets. Elements of my work are inspired by setting a scene through minimalistic installation and allowing you, the audience member, to become a spectator. With an emphasis on the injured form, the work incorporates identity-driven artifacts of my neighborhood back home. My garments in this graduate collection which are hand-patterned and self-sewn aim to represent victims, perpetrators and spectators of violence.

Subtle moments …

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 …

Tubo, Shaobo Liu

Masters Theses

In this light, while the pursuit of convenience has advanced human civilization in remarkable ways, it is essential to recognize that creativity depends on more than just abstract thought. It relies on the inevitable process of translating ideas into physical form, engaging both mind and body in a cycle of experimentation, failure, and discovery. Without opportunities to physically manipulate and construct, our creative faculties risk stagnation, underscoring the importance of preserving and reintroducing hands-on, experiential learning into modern life.

The modular system in my work prioritizes physical interaction and open-ended outcomes, which responds directly to the challenges posed by digital …

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, …

Jotographía // Fagtography: On Amor Propio Radical // Radical Self-Love, Jonathan Erick Guzman

Masters Theses

“Jotographía // Fagtography: On Amor Propio Radical // Radical Self-Love” is an interdisciplinary thesis that explores the intersections of queer Chicanx identity, photography, and performance as technologies of survival and self-construction. I construct a speculative archive of Chicanx queer experience through my tripartite personas: Barbí, Luke, and myself—collectively, the Guzman Triplets.

Through these embodied avatars, I embrace rasquachismo, camp, Catholic iconography, and hybrid photographic processes—including Polaroids, AI-manipulated imagery, anthotypes, and installation—to investigate visibility, fragmentation, and ancestral memory. Rooted in Gloria Anzaldúa’s frameworks of la herida abierta and nepantla, José Esteban Muñoz’s concepts of disidentification and queer futurity, and bell …

The Blue Below Still Breathes, Yiyi Wang

Masters Theses

The Blue Below Still Breathes explores disappearance transformation rather than loss—a shift in visibility that reveals the pressures, absences, and structures shaping perception. Across interactive installations and print works, I examine how power operates through omission, fragility, and formal control. At the heart of this practice is printmaking, reimagined as a responsive, impermanent medium that challenges its historical association with fixedness.

The thesis installation features a 5x5 grid of thermochromic screenprints of a concrete wall, where viewer proximity activates a randomized sequence of heating panels. As heat raises the temperature of the surface, a field of blue gradually emerges, breaking …

The Navel Of The Dream, Ella C. Baum

Masters Theses

The images in The Navel of the Dream evoke a state of groundlessness. In this body of work, photographs act as thresholds between what is seen and what is felt, between daydreams and nightmares, and memories and myths. The camera is used as a means to engage with feelings of loss, and reenact the mythos of childhood, as well as the deep waters of the subconscious.

Created in Southern Sweden between 2022 and 2025, these photographs investigate the fallow winter landscape, the liminal space of deep, dark Scandinavian nights and the transformative qualities of ice, snow and …

Silent Veins, Yinghan Zhang

Masters Theses

My art is founded on the scholar stones in my home in China. These are rocks once collected by ancient scholars and poets, who admired their natural forms for their aesthetic beauty and philosophical qualities. These silent creations of nature are at the heart of my creative inspiration. They serve as spiritual vessels, connecting natural philosophy with personal memory. I listen to the whispers of time within the textures of stone and paper through the contemporary expression of traditional techniques such as rubbing and water-based woodcut, allowing otherwise silent materials to speak a language spanning centuries. In this thesis, Silent …

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 …

Transplant Transplant(Ed) Transplant(Ing), So Jung Yoon

Masters Theses

Boundaries shape our lives and identities. The tangible presence of boundaries becomes a medium for engaging with the world—such as who occupies a space and how, or what tools are deemed valid in a design process. These boundaries aren’t always visible; they’re embedded in systems, habits, and assumptions that shape how we move, create, and are recognized. They extend far beyond fixed geographies and the specific positions we occupy within them.

Transplanting is the process by which things are moved or move across boundaries in hopes of being planted, finding a place to stay. Though it can be a search …

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 …

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 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.

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.

A Personal Manual Of Escapism, Qing Wen

Masters Theses

In this fast-paced, information-saturated era, avoidance has become a common mechanism of self-preservation. Confronted with global crises and structural instability, the current generation increasingly adopt a pessimistic stance toward the future: some retreat into virtual worlds, others find themselves unable to bear the weight of real-life responsibilities, and many turn to art as a private sanctuary. But is avoidance only a pejorative term?

It wasn’t until recently that I realized, nearly all of my creative work has stemmed from a place, or an action of escape. The imagined worlds I’ve built, the spaces I created to flee from reality—without knowing …

Where Motion Lingers..., Cheng-Lin Lee

Masters Theses

In the pursuit of seamlessness, modern technology has become oversimplified, reduced to simple taps and pushes of buttons. This standardized interaction feels distant and mechanical, offering services without inviting touch, movement, or emotion.

This thesis explores how technology can blend into everyday life in a gentle way. The designed objects will focus on integrating familiar movements that elicit moments of harmony within interactions with technology. Through design transformations, this project seeks to uncover how everyday movements, like lifting a handle and placing flowers, can transform our technological exchanges into something felt rather than simply performed.

The findings reveal that when …

The Red Thread: Objects As Medium, Hsin-Ning Alin Yang

Masters Theses

There are moments when people hesitate to speak their emotions or needs
—whether it’s love that feels too shy to articulate, needs that risk sounding too forceful, or feelings too vague to verbalize. By shifting the priority of emotion and communication factor ahead of pure functionality, this thesis posits that objects can serve as an alternative medium of communication.

This thesis begins by examining the root causes of communication difficulties and the coping strategies people use, ultimately identifying five situations in which objects can effectively substitute for verbal interaction. Building on these categories, the thesis explores how an object’s features, …

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 …

Character Dialogue And How It Works In Cinema, Janet Best

Masters Theses

BEYOND THE DOOR is a psychological thriller screenplay about an abandoned house and two sixth-grade girls with a shared trauma.

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 …