Digital Commons Network^™

Touching Ground: Embodied Methods Of Design, Mary A. Ritchie

Masters Theses

This thesis argues that landscape architecture must more intentionally integrate embodied, outdoor practices into the design process in order to foster a deeper understanding of and engagement with the primary medium of the field: the land itself. When we study a site through digital means, we detach our bodies and minds from the physical material we are working with. Embodied practices encourage a slower, more attentive mode of observation that engages both mind and body through tangible actions and sensory experiences. Through physical touch and sensory engagement, we gain insight into a place across many scales, from the granular texture …

Through You I Will Feel, Mitchell L. Poon

Masters Theses

Through You I Will Feel is an installation exploring my family’s archive and my relationship with my ancestral heritage. An abstracted simulation of my childhood home’s dining room, it examines how revisiting the family archive can reveal new information not only about the past, but also about the present and the future. The installation consists of five works which integrate printmaking and print-adjacent processes: a set of four lithographic prints, cyanotype and natural toning on fabric, inkjet-printing on shrink plastic, UV dye-printing on polymer clay tiles, and digitally printed wallpaper.

The written thesis is a culmination of my time at …

Human After All, Ritu Mantri

Masters Theses

human

0. a being, relating to, or belonging to a person or to people.

1. an organism whose behaviour is structured by survival, instinct, and the immediate conditions of its environment.

2. a primate capable of thinking in abstractions. It makes marks, builds tools, and uses language to reflect on itself and the world around it.

3. a maker that increasingly constructs systems as a mirror of itself to store memory, meaning, and perception beyond the limits of its body.

4. an entity whose intelligence is increasingly indistinguishable from the tools and technological infrastructures it has built.

5. a superhuman …

One: The Body, Architecture, And The Environment, Anna Crookston

Masters Theses

Perception alters action, and action alters reality. My work explores architecture as a means of reconnecting the body to the environment. Rather than acting as a barrier from the natural world, architecture becomes a frame through which the body can perceive its relationship to place. Raised in Eden, Utah, near the Wasatch Mountains and Pineview Reservoir, I developed an awareness of environmental stewardship through observing the neglect and rezoning of a local wildlife corridor by governing bodies. I view environmental crises not as isolated political problems, but as symptoms of a culture that sees itself as separate from nature. My …

Finding The Estuary, Rhea Hu

Masters Theses

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Menstrual Muses: Art, Storytelling, And The Care-Based Communication Of Menstrual Justice, Burcu Koleli

Masters Theses

Menstrual Muses is an artistic research project comprising a written thesis and a body of work developed across soft sculpture, ceramics, illustration, graphic memoir, digital media, and participatory workshops. The written component operates alongside the studio practice, outlining the project’s theoretical framework, methodology, and context while engaging questions of communication, accessibility, embodiment, and stigma. It situates menstruation within feminist discourse, examining how it has been culturally silenced, regulated, and shaped through systems of power.

The artistic work functions as research materialized through practice, responding to the central question of how my art can facilitate conversations around menstrual justice. It explores …

Where Each Step Lands: Reconnecting And Reparenting Through Visual Narrative, Skye Wang

Masters Theses

This research begins with lived experiences of dissociation and a persistent sense of disconnection between body and consciousness. It explores the potential of visual narrative as an embodied practice. Through daily walking and sketching, bodily sensations are translated into visual language through a synesthetic process, forming the foundation for a picture book as the central outcome of this project.

The picture book adopts the perspective of a jumping spider positioned beneath a five-year-old girl’s shoe, creating a shifting, downward-facing viewpoint. The spider functions as a viewing position, while the girl represents the inner child. The narrative is constructed around the …

Beyond The Tampon (Menstrual Equity & Justice Certification), Rucha Kale

Masters Theses

This thesis argues that while menstruation is a common life event, experiences related to menstruation are not inherently inequitable for a range of reasons that relate to wider currents that revolve around a narrow idea of the “default” human body. One imagined as non-menstruating, uninterrupted in its activities, or endowed with social, economic, and political agency. This project asks what becomes possible when those usually excluded from this norm are no longer treated as exceptions to accommodate, but as core and central constituencies to design with and for.

Using menstruation as a critical site of inquiry, the thesis first examines …

Frictional Intelligence, Posheng Cheng

Masters Theses

This is an experimental interaction design project that challenges anthropomorphism in human-computer interaction. In particular, the recent advancement of artificial intelligence technologies like Large Language Models has taken anthropomorphism to new heights. The conversational chatbot interface of AI prioritizes mimicking an inherently human communication medium to maximize human-likeness. However, anthropomorphism has several downsides. Conversational interfaces obscure the limitations and the tangible cost of the technology. They also imply fictional moral status and human-level cognitive capabilities, which means general public sentiment focuses on the ``overhyped'' excitement and fear rather than on other socio-ethical and capacity questions that are far more urgent …

Waterway: A Steam-Based Therapeutic Device System, Mingyuan Dong

Masters Theses

Across history and global cultures, water has played a central and often spiritual role in practices of care, from cleansing rituals to saunas and steam therapies. Yet, within contemporary product design, water is typically treated as a utility rather than as an experiential material capable of shaping perception, attention, and well-being. This thesis, Waterway, investigates how water, specifically in its steam state, can be designed as both a therapeutic medium and a ritualized experience that engages the body and mind.

Waterway proposes a steam-based wellness system that addresses physical pain and somatic discomfort while cultivating slower, more attentive interaction. Rather …

American Paradise, Virginia Hanusik

Masters Theses

The following is a collection of stories and ideas about the making of our physical and emotional worlds, along with their fracturing, deconstruction, and degradation within the American industrial landscape.  It suggests the value of the unknown and the grace of mistakes, emotional and material friction, and the hiccups that come with learning.

For American Paradise, I’m bringing my interest in landscape extraction, and the people and families within them, to my own autobiography. In this work I turn to where I grew up, the people that brought me there, my connection to manual labor, and the use of specific …

破酆都 Calling Her Through The Gates, Yuqi Liu

Masters Theses

My practice centers on papermaking, printmaking, and artist books to explore fiber as both image and language. I treat paper not simply as a surface, but as a living material through which memory, labor, and history can be held. By making my own sheets from plant fibers, fungi, and other organic matter, I create works in which material and meaning are inseparable. Shaped by my engagement with the natural world, women’s history, and overlooked vernacular forms of knowledge, my work moves through cycles of life and death, presence and disappearance, fragility and resilience. My projects with mushrooms and mycelium led …

An Anxious Artist's Guide To Magic, Mot Tuman

Masters Theses

Illustration’s essence is using some type of media to tell a story. This could be anything from sculpture, watercolor, even just text alone. Beyond its medium, I have been thinking for a while of illustration and storytelling as a type of illusory magic. Magic, according to the Oxford language dictionary as being "The power of using supernatural or other unseen forces to apparently influence events or human behaviour." It gives us the power to reach inside the mind and heart of a person and change their emotional and mental state. It's the ability to create a world and have others …

Jewelry As A Portable Sanctuary, Yuhao Li

Masters Theses

This thesis examines how individuals remain intact in the presence of emotional difficulty. Rather than treating protection as withdrawal, the research proposes that stability emerges through the construction of an interior structure capable of holding vulnerability without collapse. Drawing on psychological theory, philosophy, and spatial thinking, it frames emotional repair as a spatial condition: an interior that can contain experience and be returned to when external conditions become unstable.
Within this framework, jewelry is redefined as a material extension of this interior. Positioned between body and world, it operates as a structure of containment, functioning as a portable …

The Wall As Commons, Raveena Deshpande

Masters Theses

Collective infrastructures for informal domesticity 

As urban populations grow, access to affordable housing declines, pushing certain sections of the population to build informal settlements outside legal and formal construction systems. These settlements often lack access to basic living infrastructures - water, sanitation, and electricity- even as they house a large share of the population in developing countries.

Current models of designing for informality exist as top down planning approaches, that ignore lived realities at the scale of the home. These design models are incongruent with informal lifestyles, and undermine the sense of belonging that comes with rituals of self-authorship in …

Love Letters To Insects: Affect-Based Science Communication, Manuela Guzmán

Masters Theses

Love Letters to Insects is a series of artists’ books that, mimicking a scientific insect collection, asks how visual narrative can shape and reframe our relationship to our environment.

Delving into the historical construction of the nature-culture divide, my thesis considers how colonial history has shaped modes of representation in Latin America that distance, objectify, and “other” living beings. Engaging with science, history, philosophy, and decolonial and Indigenous perspectives, as well as the work of comic artists and theorists, I think about the way I learned to interact with my environment and find in visual storytelling a place to challenge …

Gray Sheep, Jennifer Richie

Masters Theses

When material comforts are not available or accessible, how can we care for one another with what is available? Can these methods be scaled up? How can we emulate the tight cultural bonds of people who relied on each other due to their isolation from cultural centers (like towns and cities)? Is it possible to be self-sufficient and not wealthy in the 21st century or has this ability died with past generations?

Using only scraps, found and discarded materials, and items from RISD’s Loop Lab and Second Life, I explore the skills and engineering that would have been a necessary …

Perceptual Heterotopia: A Spatial Experience Through Light, Media, And Textiles, Anne Yeoji Kim

Masters Theses

This study originates from sensory experience of observing sunrises and sunsets. Although the space in which these phenomena occur remains constant, it is perceived in different ways due to changes in the light that enters the space at these times. From these sensory experiences, the study began to inquire into the relationship between reality and the ideal. From this inquiry, it evolved into an exploration of how the ideal, or utopian, could be experienced through the senses within the realm of reality.

The concept of a heterotopia, as proposed by Michel Foucault, was used to expand upon these issues. A …

Somatic Prosthetics For Planetary Resonance, Disha Dharesh Kumar R

Masters Theses

This thesis investigates how industrial design can transcend extractive technological paradigms in favor of relational interfaces that foster planetary attunement. Framing the climate crisis as a 'crisis of imagination', the research challenges the Western bifurcation of nature and culture by drawing on Indic cosmologies- which recognize stones, plants, and ecosystems as conscious at different levels and participants in a shared cosmic field. By synthesizing research in Biosemiotics, Quantum Information Pansycishm, and Neuroscience, the project redefines intelligence as a distributed, more-than-human phenomenon.

The research materializes as a speculative design artifact: a device that functions as a somatic prosthetic for planetary resonance. …

Material Costs, Karima Weinman

Masters Theses

This thesis investigates how migration fatality and disappearance data can be reinterpreted through material craft to create a more reflective encounter with information. Working with the Missing Migrants Project's dataset, this project asks how design can communicate dimensions of human loss that conventional data visualization cannot reach.

The work situates contemporary border violence within a longer colonial history, arguing that the logics of surveillance and quantification that structured European imperial expansion persist in the databases that govern mobility in the Mediterranean today.

Terrazzo is a 15th-century Venetian flooring technique built from discarded fragments bound together into a unified surface. This …

In Common: A Housing Exploration In Roxbury, Massachusetts, Brooke Mclaughlin

Masters Theses

The rhythms of domestic life are largely hidden behind walls and closed doors, rendering everyday acts of care invisible. Further, the ability to have a home to invite others into and to know one’s neighbors has become a privilege, which produces a challenge in how we live together. In Common reframes this narrative, drawing attention to everyday routine visible as public care.

By situating itself in Roxbury, Massachusetts, opportunities emerge to recognize shared humanity through the inhabitation and maintenance of programmed public rooms. Without walls to privatize care, the rhythms of resting, cooking, living, and caring become legible as collective …

Hidden Systems, Samuel Choi

Masters Theses

Across buildings and cities, moisture is managed, concealed, and discharged through convoluted systems of containment. Still, water ultimately resists this framework. It reveals itself as leaks, puddles, condensation—moments typically understood as technical failure. Hidden Systems reframes these conditions as architectural knowledge, one that becomes evidence of water’s material capacity, limits of infrastructure, and a record of time.

NYC is constructed on, powered by, and profiting from water. Although it hosts a robust network, seepages disrupt control, allowing systems to be traced across scales. As pipes expand, contract, and freeze, the project unfolds seasonally, moving through water’s three states: solid, liquid, …

Museum Of Fragments, Shuchang Fan

Masters Theses

What happens to architecture after it is no longer a building? In the drifting fragments of demolished courtyards, abandoned film sets, and forgotten timber joints, I trace the lingering pulse of history. Can they be stitched together to form a living encyclopedia? I began by looking at traditional Chinese architecture as living cultural archives, where ancient beliefs, living styles, religions, landscapes, typologies, and forms are represented in physical spaces. Through the principles of borrowed scenery, framed views, and sequential unfolding, natural and constructed elements turn into narrative devices. Today, these worlds scatter across construction sites and studio back-lots. In places …

Learning From The Remains: Meditations On Sustainability, Julae Tan

Masters Theses

What remains when a person or material assemblage is stripped of its

component parts?

What is left is the remainder, an irreductible core.

Purely cerebral learning can be fleeting. A hybrid approach of cerebral and

visceral, “perverse” learning grounded in a familial understanding of the

remainder yields a more resilient pedagogy that endures long after leaving the

site of formal education.

This research was completed under the aegis of the 2025/26 Sustainability

Design Lab and features the subject of making with paper discards as the

primary mode of interrogation.

Via a collection of essays, a literature review, as well as …

Social Soils: Reclaiming The Urban Pedosphere, Manal Dar

Masters Theses

Soil is in crisis. A third of the world’s soils are already degraded, and by 2050 that number may reach 90%, threatening biodiversity, climate stability, and food security. Urban soils, in particular, carry the layered records of industrial residue and environmental mistakes, disproportionately impacting immigrant and racialized communities.

The thesis asks what happens when landscape architecture begins from the root up, taking soil as both problem and possibility. Social Soils takes on the case study of Greenpoint, where both organic and inorganic contaminants in the soil such as lead, arsenic, PAHs and VOCs pose serious health risks to the inhabitants. …

Open Forms, Barbara Cutlak

Masters Theses

Open Forms

Architecture always exists in relation to the context in which it stands. There is no way, however, to anticipate how the constructed space will be inhabited, or transformed by the surroundings — and so, it remains open to discovery and change. Graphic design form can operate in a similar way: opening itself to a context by offering multiple ways of seeing, interacting and being performed.

Drawing from the contexts that have informed my practice — my training in architecture and the artistic movements of Brazil, my home country — Open Forms experiments with how to translate these spatial …

Billiards Cosmographies, Camilla Radoyce, Camilla Radoyce

Masters Theses

The world is full of systems too large to change. Climate catastrophe, extraction, infrastructure, and property organize everyday life while remaining largely invisible in their totality. We possess the tools to alter these conditions, yet the same arrangements continue to return. The same worlds are built again and again.

Billiards Cosmographies treats billiards as a way of thinking about how humans organize around inherited systems and enduring forms. This thesis proposes the billiards table not as a fixed object, but as a gizmo: a device for imagining how new social worlds might be assembled from a constellation of what already …

Just Between Us (And Everyone We Tell...), Deborah Khodanovich

Masters Theses

Graphic designers are often obsessed with a broader public. The desire to be seen, to be heard, to have our work reach the broadest audience possible—these are goals deeply ingrained in our discipline. But why? Just Between Us (and everyone we tell…) challenges us to abandon this fixation, proposing instead that graphic design should concern itself with the private—the intimate, the local, the unseen.

This is where gossip comes in. Gossip is the language of the invisible, a form of sharing, and a means of knowledge-production and preservation that has historically been dismissed as frivolous, immoral, and—most egregious of all—associated …

Fragments Of The Grassland, Zihan Liu

Masters Theses

This thesis investigates Tibetan nomadic pastoralism in the Himalayan region, where habitation is inseparable from seasonal migration and environmental conditions. Focusing on Ganzi County in Sichuan Province, where nomadic and settled lifestyles coexist.

The research positions "documentation" as both method and design driver, provides a possibility that architecture can mediate cultural continuity and coexistence between Tibetan nomadic pastoralism and its surrounding culture. By transforming documentation methodology into a design methodology, the mobility of architecture has become into a spatial strategy. Through a mobile marketplace, the project enables ongoing exchange between nomadic and settled lifestyles and among diverse cultural groups, positioning …

Painting As Sfx, Callie Coccia

Masters Theses

Almost all of the subject matter I have been preoccupied with these past two years (and my adult life) has originated from a place of dissonance. There’s a narrative experience that things like wax figures, midcentury film, and theme parks insist upon. That narrative insistence contrasts with an observed reality. Epcot does not have a slice of Italy housed within the park, Bette Davis does not have an evil twin (A Stolen Life [1946], Dead Ringer [1964]), a wax figure of Alfred Hitchcock is not Alfred Hitchcock. Yet these narratives are so overbearingly convincing or coercive that their sweaty alternate …