Digital Commons Network^™

Dying Differently: Designing A Death-Oriented Psychedelic Treatment Center, Grace Caiazza

Masters Theses

In the context of therapeutic treatment for the terminally ill, psychedelic assisted therapy instigates a direct confrontation with a person’s experience of dying. Over the course of several weeks a patient will arrive at a facility, lay down in a room, and for up to eight hours at a time recommit themselves to the question: how do I comprehend death? Their answer will come in the form of sensations and sounds, visions and abstractions — things that are perhaps not immediately understood, but rather are immediately and vibrantly felt. The answer will follow a non-traditional logic unfamiliar to the empirical …

Last Sunset : Design To Alleviate Social Isolation For Chinese Elderly, Linghui Li

Masters Theses

China has one of the fastest aging populations in the world. The country’s rapid economic development and urbanization have separated millions of older adults from their children, leading to empty nest families where the elderly must fend for themselves without assistance. Design in the modern era caters to the younger generation with more consumption power while neglecting the needs of these older adults.

In China, from the moment a child is born, confinement centers, preschools, and tutoring institutions, those venues are common throughout the urban fabric. Which spaces are mainly designed for the Chinese elderly? Besides meeting necessary physical needs …

Post-Standardization, Hengrong Stanley Ni

Masters Theses

The epistemological ground for Post-Standardization is the pursuit of a humanitarian and egalitarian Utopia.

Marx notoriously argues that the economic Base determines the Superstructure. Objecting to Marx’s deterministic categorization, Post-Standardization brings together the Base and the Superstructure, where social housing and cultural institutions (e.g., museums and libraries) amalgamate. In the context of this thesis, “social housing” is the Base, denoting a specific typology of this architectural category: social housing projects utilizing Standardized Prefabricated Architecture (abbreviated as SPA in the following); “cultural institutions” are the Superstructure, denoting such institutions that require little sunlight and produce little noise (termed as Dim-Quiet Programs …

The Cthulhu Journey : Storytelling Through An Architectural Immersive Experience, Rui Zhang

Masters Theses

The exhibition of sequential art is becoming increasingly popular. The subjects of these shows vary from fantasy, horror to science fiction depending on the style of authors. Compared with other 2d images, sequential art requires more narrative framing. Typical exhibitions show sequential art like regular images, however narrative is the essence of sequential art. This thesis will find a way to exhibit sequential art forms in a way that respects that they are based in storytelling. I will develop an immersive experience of sequential art. Immersion is also a narrative-based experience, if we combine the immersive experience with the sequential …

Matingkad - Flamboyant, Bhen Alan

Masters Theses

In the Tagalog language, matingkad is used when describing colors or light. Its English translation, flamboyant, usually describes a character of a person - a queer, performer, drag?

People have called me flamboyant due to the way I dress, my gestures, and how I approach my work. Because of this, I have experience discrimination and abuse towards my race and gender, as well as my citizenship status. Therefore I have learned to begin employing flamboyance to be opaque (matingkad na kulay).

With this experience, I had to adjust the opacity of my body as a way of survival …

Breaking | Grounding | Growing: Expanding The Rhode Island Gardening Reentry Programs As A Pathway Towards Stability, Juliana Soltys

Masters Theses

What happens to the over two million people incarcerated in U.S. prisons and jails?

Changing in sentencing laws and policies have created a cycle of imprisonment, racially isolating and oppressing BIPOC communities. Reintegration and reentry programs are an avenue to break the cycle of recidivism. Through my work, I have developed hands-on, structured opportunities for justice-involved adults to rebuild a life for themselves by increasing the accessibility of gardening reentry programs. This project creates a space for mentorship and support for Rhode Island’s formerly incarcerated people with the goal of helping them to develop vital life skills through growing and …

Endless Construction : Occupant Activism And Authorship, Jiayi Wang

Masters Theses

Though we don’t think of it this way, “Adaptive Reuse” often happens naturally, guided by users who modify their physical environment to satisfy urgent living needs. While these modifications may appear haphazard, they show the user’s individualism and life philosophy. We, as designers, should embrace these interventions to explore how to participate with the occupants’ adaptive reuse process over time. Given the richness of adaptation within the old residences in the ancient Chinese city of Suzhou, it is an appropriate place to explore both the skill of self–modification and the potential for interaction of designers in this process.

The old …

Moving Through Time, Anca Gherghiceanu

Masters Theses

Post-communism life in Romania is a duality: people fleeting the country in search of a better life and the simultaneous shrinking cities due to this migration. The built fabric of the city holds distorted nostalgia for those who have left and the burning reality that surrounds the ones that remain. It results in popular villages and cities starting to be abandoned at a massive rate. The migrant story in search of a new life cultivates a journey of loneliness, sacrifice, and sorrow.This thesis will shine light on the physiological effects of mass migration in Romania through satirical editing and storytelling, …

Framing: Embracing Trauma In Your "Surrounding World", Zheng Xu

Masters Theses

Have you ever stayed alone and immersed yourself in memories? Have any fragments made you uncomfortable? It was a nightmare. Guilt, self-accusation, inability, exhaustion, and escape took my body and mind. They grew from my traumatic experience. They taunted me and tried to drag me into the abyss of the infinite past when I was stressed out and lost control of the external environment. The shadow struck me until my defense and control system collapsed. The scenes of loss, neglect and pressure became the violence to my psyche.

Unoptimistically, trauma always exists because of natural disasters, bereavements, cutthroat competitions, economic …

Rememory, Jonathan Mark Jackson

Masters Theses

Rememory, coined in Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved, refers to the psychological action of placing forgotten or misplaced memories into a narrated context within the self. Rather than directly “remembering,” the characters in Morrison’s novel, like their author, rely on a web of socially produced or shared memories as a way to understand their past. This essay catalogs an on-going performance of rememory in my photographic work. Through an interrogation of physical archives, I remap the historic presences of Black life in New England. This research based practice takes me to the preserved homes and to the workplaces of my …

Dead Letter Room, Allie Tsubota

Masters Theses

Dead Letter Room is a photographic and textual dialogue with images that emerge from the end of the Asia-Pacific Wars and World War II in the Pacific. These images are governed by the historical contexts that produce them; they are mediated by the explosive aftershocks of nuclear war, the transoceanic space of imperial desire, and the onset of oblivion in the aftermath of catastrophe. Throughout this essay, I present the historical, image-theoretical and psychoanalytical frameworks that meaningfully guide my address of historical images and my approach to making new ones. With detours through various artists and theorists, I offer the …

A Fleeting Landscape: Resurrecting The Edges Of The Estuary, Vrinda Mathur

Masters Theses

A Fleeting Landscape invites the city dweller to experience a mixed media microcosm of the marshes and discover what has been obscured through the encroachment of urban development.

From the salt marshes of Rhode Island to their tropical counterpart in the Sundarban (pronounced: shundar-bon) mangroves of India, wetlands are the world’s natural barriers. Fighting against extreme weather events between land and sea, the edges of this fragile ecosystem continue to shrink and degrade as anthropogenic stressors (infrastructure development, unsustainable land use, and aquaculture) increase. In a 2022 report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) persuasively argues for the protection …

Sobremesa, Charlie Herbozo-Vidal

Masters Theses

In order to understand the social and political issues faced by the Peruvian community in the present day, it is necessary to get acquainted with one of the most significant moments of its history: The “colonial Knot” – The systems put in place after the arrival of European colonizers to the American continent. By crafting a communal experience centered around the mealspace, a key element in Peruvian Identity, I hope to bring awareness to the social tensions, violent structures and remnants of colonial rule that persist to this day. In developing an uncomfortable experience, I am researching whether exposure to …

Arriving In The City: Reimagining The Urban Footholds For Rural Workers, Xinlei Gu

Masters Theses

China is now experiencing rapid urbanization and a significant movement of migrants from their original villages to established core cities. The homogenization resulting from the massive urbanization led to the identity crisis of the city itself, as well as the rural migrant workers, a phenomenon described as “Placelessness” (Edward Relph, 1976). As one of the Chinese megacities, Chongqing has gradually become placeless due to its fast-growing economy. Still, there are moments and places in Chongqing that reveal the migrant nature of the city and its close link with migrant laborers. In the thesis, such moments and places are defined as …

Darkness Matters: Understanding The Ecological Effects And Human Sensory Perception Of Night Lighting, Zitong (Shirley) Hui

Masters Theses

Night is 50% of the planetary experience. Nighttime visible illumination is strongly tied to progress, human activities and urban structure. As our cities become brighter, they bring huge impacts on ecology and human perception.

Darkness is still something worth pursuing in urban nightscapes. This thesis explores the potential of using darkness as the starting point for designing public spaces for use at night, and focuses on the restoration of the ideal habitat for fireflies in the Jamaica bay area, in New York City. The study of the dynamic relationship between light, culture and wildlife can produce a flexible strategy that …

Design In Support Of Playfulness, Seung Hwan Oh

Masters Theses

Playful environments can be conceived as landscapes able to support an individual’s internal sense of playfulness and its external manifestation. These environments cultivate a sense of place where recreational, therapeutic, and educational resources are merged based on the conviction that nature is a positive influence.

This project explores how outdoor spaces encompass the built and natural world, convey a sense of connection to spatial ephemera and phenomena, and ultimately how space can become spaces for individuals. The project explores the notion of playfulness and the meaning it may acquire for design within landscape architecture. The study aims to positively contribute …

Traveling Troubled Wallflower, Julius Cavira

Masters Theses

Cavira is an interdisciplinary Conceptual artist... nuff said.

All At Sea, Yangyang Mao

Masters Theses

What is the reality of young people born between 1985 and 1995 in China? How do they feel about themselves? As one of the generation, I feel like I’m often haunted by futures that failed to happen. Reasons are multiple and are closely influenced by the social context, such as the implications of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) and One Child Policy (1980-2016), which has marked each individual’s growth in this age with unfading recollections.

Block Chain Home, Jonggun Lee

Masters Theses

Studies indicate that every four years urban dwellers relocate. Given this phenomenon, the direction of urban housing development in mega cities now encourages the divestment of personal furnishings to support mobility. While efficient, the singular imprint of furnishings upon individual space is getting severely flattened by suggested shapes and built in furnishings that define the form of dwelling. Also, unlike suburbs, turbulent cities tend to make people live alone, making them lose their uniqueness in the process of adaptation.

This thesis lives in between the ideas of SuperStudio, Andrea Zitell, and Metabolism architecture. In that, the concept of “BLOCK CHAIN …

Rebuilding Collective Effervescence : A "Ballroom" For Post-Pandemic Revelry, Di Ma

Masters Theses

Collective Effervescence is an event that can make a community or a society come together and simultaneously communicate regarding the same thought, or participate in the same action. Such desire happened during the post- World War I period, when people were freed from the depression of war and sought pure and positive happiness, which was also what society needed. Nowadays in the post-pandemic recovery, the public, after suffering from and getting used to isolation and social distancing, has an unexpected desire for physical communications, but still fear to gather psychologically. This reaction can be seen as a “post-traumatic stress disorder” …

Design For Designers : An Incubator For Young Designers To Grow, Jiajie Yang

Masters Theses

In China, professional survival in the years directly after college is especially difficult for young designers as it is a major challenge to gain the needed experience to transition smoothly from study into the early stages of their careers. In contrast, Chinese society nowadays increasingly values good design. However, in order for this to translate into more professional opportunities for young designers, greater public exposure to and understanding of the design profession is needed.

This thesis proposes a design incubator that bridges design school with professional practice by providing key facilities, space, and professional opportunities and community after graduation. A …

Zoomorphic Amalgamation: Speculative Devices For Alternative Communication, Yuta Yang

Masters Theses

Zoomorphic Amalgamation: Speculative Devices for Alternative Communication is a series of speculative works that assist introverts re-adapting in the extro-oriented society. The work serves as a lens to challenge and question the authority afforded to extroverts in contemporary society, and aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of introverted personality. As a person with an introverted personality, the thesis project draws upon personal experience and to reflect on the current bias and stereotype of characteristics that common to the introverts.

By integrating technological sensors and microcontrollers, the works are created to help the wearer express insecurity, at the same time providing …

Ports Of Entry, Forough Abadian

Masters Theses

Ports of entry are places where one may lawfully enter a country by crossing land and sea borders‭. ‬This thesis frames the space conceptually where the boundaries of place, time, culture, and identity are crossed through existing ports or by building new ones. ‬

As an Iranian immigrant in the United States‭, ‬displacement of identity informs my worldview and design practice‭. ‬I find myself between two worlds, one inherited and the other adopted. ‬Both worlds are simultaneously active and exert their forces on my thought process‭. However, their interrelated dynamic is ambivalent because their path intersects and diverges unforeseeably‭. ‬My …

Together: A Transformational Sequence Of Healing, Deborah Zhuang

Masters Theses

In June 2019, millions of people in Hong Kong took to the streets to voice their discontent with the extradition to Mainland China. Hong Kong was a former British colony and was handed back to China in 1997. Under the policy of “One Country, Two Systems”, Hong Kong has a separated legal system and judiciary from Mainland China. In 2019, the Hong Kong Government raised an extradition bill that allowed fugitives in Hong Kong to be sent to other jurisdictions, including Marco, Taiwan, and Mainland China, which resulted in the large-scale Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement with increasingly serious confrontations. …

Paradigms Of Horror, Xingge Zhang

Masters Theses

“It seems an unaccountable pleasure which the spectators of a well-written tragedy receive from sorrow, terror, anxiety and other passions, that are in themselves disagreeable and uneasy” (Hume, 1757).

Horror, said Adorno in another context, was beyond the scope of psychology. Horror tries to frighten, shock, horrify, and disgust using a variety of visual and auditory leitmotifs and devices, including reference to the supernatural, the abnormal, mutilation, blood, gore, the infliction of pain, death, deformity, putrefaction, darkness, invasion, mutation, extreme instability, and the unknown. Supernatural or uncanny narratives can shape, distort, or reflect the storyline in literary works, but also …

Ready Made, Made Ready: Everyday Objects For Everyday Emergency, Dara Benno

Masters Theses

What does it mean to adapt to a changing world?

Climate change is altering the world as we know it. We live in a chronic state of emergency. It’s easy to slip into a downward spiral of despair or ignore what we know to be true in order to carry on with our day-to-day responsibilities. By facilitating a complete recognition and heightened awareness of the common threats brought on by the climate crisis, we can begin to make the mental shift toward living in a new normal.

Ready Made, Made Ready rejects a dissociative attitude and seeks to shift exceptionalist …

Attuning The Viewfinder, Ian De Silva

Masters Theses

As there are many mobile apps designed to pull your attention, these interactions have become a kind of normalized addictiveness, such as doom scrolling.

I am working on the topic of attention and a meditation app using augmented reality because I want to understand how this technology can be useful from beyond the screen and into a physical space.

Can’T Stop Coyote, Tala Worrell

Masters Theses

I work hard to keep language out of my studio. Language reminds me of my mom’s voice, people telling me what to do, not having the right accent, critiques, criticism in general, mis-truths, and never being good enough. Language is the material of my thoughts, and most of my thoughts, or the ones on a constant loop anyhow, are all those voices over and over again.

Painting is where I get to be me, with myself, and in my body. Painting is my home, family, refuge, and best friend. I’m not looking at myself from the outside, no one can …

Memories Unboxed: Connecting People With Stories Of Our Possessions, Megan Tzu-Hsien Chao

Masters Theses

We constantly fall into a cycle of consumption that involves acquiring, retaining, and relinquishing items, whether we need them or not. Even though we are influenced by popular media to declutter more as we acquire new things, the root of the problem will still exist if we continue to neglect the reasons why we own things in the first place and why we hold onto them.

Why is it less stressful to make a list of possessions we enjoy having than to make a list of things we need to throw away?

This thesis hopes to relieve people of making …

Trash Matters: Material Strategies For Prolonging The Life Of Single-Use Plastic, Zixin Li

Masters Theses

Plastic pollution has become one of the most pressing environmental issues. Communities worldwide have addressed the importance of facing the problem of plastic pollution control and issues relevant policies to effectively reduce the use of plastic products. The sudden outbreak of Covid-19 has made the urgency of the problem less significant. Nevertheless, the use of disposable plastics to comply with public health protocols has hugely increased making plastic pollution all the more severe.

Through material experimentation, this thesis reappraises different types of single-use plastic waste and attempts to transform them into longer-lasting reused solutions. It focuses on finding alternative materials …