Digital Commons Network^™

Imagine Of Space : Rest(Ing) Rooms For High-Stressed Risd Students, Fang Ho

Masters Theses

Th e Rhode Island School of Design as an arts-cultivating institution endeavors to provide abundant resources to mentally and physically support students. Even though the campus provides various mental health resources, the expression of depression, eating disorder and suicide from students has never diminished. RISD students work under high-stress conditions caused by their assignments, expectations from others and themselves, and the environment surrounding them.

Studios and work areas become spaces associated with stress and negative atmosphere. Th e materials, ceiling, fl oor and even the breathing air hint at this gray emotion. If a space where art students spend the …

Living Rooms We Don't Live In Anymore, Caroline Kable

Masters Theses

During my time at RISD, I have discovered terms and theories such as defensible space, socio physical phenomena, the Savannah Hypothesis, Christopher Alexanders Intimacy Gradient. All of these things have been amalgamating into a defensible argument to the intuitive feelings I’ve had my whole life, and have been attempting to imbue into my work. If anything, my thesis body of work is one next step in a lifelong pursuit of discovering what is it to live- how to define and manipulate the intangible bounds of human life and experience; of the millions of tiny moments and decisions that make up …

Good Times, Tim Stoelting

Masters Theses

In this body of work, I set out to show an exaggerated display of the manipulation consumers face everyday Attaching stories to objects drastically increases their value. In benign settings, this might elevate a simple trinket into a family heirloom or drive a bidding war for a piece of gum chewed by a celebrity. On the adverse side, a story can play with our emotions to turn a desire into a need.

In this way, fear-based stories are a particularly powerful motivator; they can drive people to the most extreme actions. When used as a tool, fear can persuade even …

The Emotional Intelligence Of Machines, Lokesh Zope

Masters Theses

Technologies today claim to be capable of detecting human emotion. When such technologies appear on our everyday objects, how will our interactions be like? Can these objects know when we are frustrated with them? Wouldn’t that radically change the field of user experience design? However, would people be scared of such capability?

Born from this curiosity, this thesis project is a speculative and an experimental approach that explores the overlap of the fields of User Experience Design, Affective Technologies, and Artificial Intelligence. This exploration is aimed at investigating its need and illustrating a newly designed adaptive nature of domestic appliances. …

Body (Less) Fitness, Dan Gioia

Masters Theses

It’s too cold outside. You stubbed your toe. You had too much Chipotle. You didn’t have enough Chipotle. There’s no shortage of reasons to abstain from exercise on any given day.

Designing a product or system to get someone to exercise is almost anti-design. So much of design is making things seamless and easy for whomever your user may be. You want to make it easy for people to accomplish things they want to do. But designing to get someone to exercise? You’re trying to get someone to do something unpleasant. You’re asking your user to sweat, strain, exert, and …

Building As Reef, Anna Morataya Quan

Masters Theses

We are in a new era, one that will require the most radical transformation that coastal communities have seen yet. Starting mid 21st century, subsequent generations will be witness to a time in which sea level rise manifests within the urban fabric, not only in the form of storm surges, but also in an increasingly permanent manner within the projected floodplain. Rising tides will create a shift from solid ground plane to a fluctuating one. Encroaching sea levels will bring marine life and hydrologic conditions that the built environment hasn’t been designed or prepared for. Urban circulation, infrastructure and ultimately …

Double Takes : Secular Magic & Empathic Vision, Lake Buckley

Masters Theses

This thesis examines the ways that a history of secular magic has shaped contemporary culture and design lexicons. It reviews modes of secular magic as design principles as well as the terms by which the meaning and value of these modes changed over time.

I carry on the legacy of magician filmmakers who thoughtfully questioned the material nature of their surroundings and tools in order to unearth new modes of visual experience. With film, delight drives invention which in turn strains vision and perception, requiring a certain collusion with the audience. My work celebrates the notion of the double take …

Grid In Landscape Architecture, Ying Xu

Masters Theses

Driven by the interest of the cultural meaning in the landscape architecture and the fascination of the power of the grid, the inspiration of this thesis is from the landscape architecture works that obtain both characters.

Many landscape architecture works simultaneously are expressing the cultural concern while use the grid form. Thus this thesis is exploring the association between the cultural meaning and the grid as a formal device, or to say how the grid is used to express the cultural meaning.

The investigations mainly rely on the research about historical cases.

The whole thesis process is divided into 3 …

Water For The Future, Ziqing Chen

Masters Theses

Water is a fundamental element for lives. Located in Long Island detached from the mainland of New York State, the densely-populated counties - Kings, Queens, Nassau, and Suffolk Counties - rely on groundwater for their sole freshwater source for a long time. The underground geology determines the groundwater movement on western Long Island: from Nassau County to Queens. When overpumping happens in Queens, Nassau County is firstly threatened by lowered water table. The thesis is aiming to propose a local solution to mitigate the problem brought by groundwater movement when overpumping.

In Phase 1, the study focuses on the underground …

I Trace The Fold : Fluidity And Flux In The Terrain Vague, Alicia Oas

Masters Theses

The terrain vague is the interstitial fabric of city life. It is the space between and around the inhabited city – abandoned urban space that constantly shifts in form and function. The terrain vague is found in empty buildings, former factories, parking lots, along the train tracks, and in unclaimed alleyways. In these still and quiet places, a fragmented narrative emerges from the pattern of urban color, texture, and light.

I record these patterns in the structure of the textile. Warp and weft interweave in layers of experience. The curtain captures both the substance of our collective memory and the …

Narratives Of Public Space : A Manifesto For Future Urban Landscape In Manhattan, Jaehong Chung

Masters Theses

This thesis investigates the history of public space and how it has changed over time. Looking specifically at how social, historical, and advances in technology have influenced and changed the meaning and use of public spaces. Studies of history and its characteristics and case studies check the validity of paradigm of public spaces in Manhattan. The modern features of Manhattan have been completed over 200 hundreds years with Industrial revolutions and influx of immigrants. Due to these reasons, the main focus was to track of causalities among life style changes, social paradigms, and changes of urban landscapes.

As cities developed, …

Remediating The Garment Industry, Kellie Knight

Masters Theses

This thesis culminated from an interest in addressing the pollution by the dye processes of the textile industry on the Earth’s waterbodies. The first Phase of this thesis explored the globalization of the garment industry. The movement of production was tracked over time from the 1950’s when production occurred primarily in the United States and Europe to present day when production is worldwide. With the global spread of the industry came the global spread of its pollutants.

The second phase of the thesis investigated the functioning of the fashion industry itself to determine which process from production to distribution is …

I Was There : Irreversible View, Asma Belhamar

Masters Theses

Living in a “time lapse” is what I could say about my experience of belonging to a place like the United Arab Emirates. The compression of time and expansion of space is intensely surreal. This idea leads my process to a series of investigations about the geological and cultural tectonics of the space, where I explore the conflicts between natural landscape and architecture. The urban surroundings are precarious: even monumental and unrelenting structures can change in a matter of days. This urban phenomena is commonly known as “mega structures” where nothing is impossible to build; buildings can be finished in …

Grid Talk : Giving A Voice To Energy Infrastructures, Kelsey Wakefield

Masters Theses

Humans are energy hogs, intelligent purveyors of displaced electrical waves construed from ancient carbon compounds. Our built environment has let us forget this. Our collective ambivalence towards the subject has grown with the loss of these public assets to private companies under a socially engineered lack of public interest in energy production. There was once a time energy infrastructures were revered and upheld as public spaces, giant testaments to the greatness of society harnessing the natural world, gold stars congratulating the intelligence of humankind. Great designers, political leaders and visionaries created works of art, sculpture, landscape architecture which functioned for …

Magkasama, Christina Chen

Masters Theses

This thesis explores how Filipinos can navigate their cultural identities through apparel. The Philippines has a history dominated by colonialism, diaspora, and assimilation. These systemic issues have contributed to the erasure of Filipino culture and they continue to impact the culture today. Because of these issues, many Filipinos living in America experience a disconnect from their cultural heritage and struggle to engage with their cultural identities. This thesis uses apparel to help Filipinos understand the source of their confusion towards their heritage and provides them with agency and ownership over their identities.

Connections : A New Model To Customizing Everything, Shao-Hsuan Hou

Masters Theses

Mass customization has long been a dream. However, thanks to evolutions in technologies (e.g. Industry 4.0 and big data analytics), there are more and more enterprises that offer configured customization to consumers. In this business model, the customers have limited choices to customize their own goods, nevertheless, these limited choices may not be enough to satisfy all of the consumers’ physiological and psychological needs.

In order to fulfill this need in the market, I propose a new ecosystem that connects consumers, design firms, and manufacturers. Moreover, based on this business model, I have designed an on-line platform and customization services …

Balance Speaker : Efficient Work And Break, Jin Cao

Masters Theses

The name of this product is "Balance Speaker”. It is aimed to help designers to concentrate better while working and breaking, using sound and light in particular.

In this book, I will show you the design/testing process of the product, show how the working timeline and energy levels influence designers' concentration, and how to design the interaction of the product and test its usability. A

Communicatronics, Adi Azulay

Masters Theses

Design in its nature is a future facing practice. But the future is hard to predict or often even imagine. So how are we as designer to approach these types of problems?

In this thesis I attempt a novel design methodology to derive insights and produce new interaction models for long range communication. The methodology, which can be applied to any topic, focuses on a study of the past. More specifically using experimental archeology, the practice of rebuilding historical objects in order to test functionality and viability of a hypothesis. For this project I learned how to send smoke signals …

Tendrescopic Endeavors And Other Dynamics, Jared Akerstrom

Masters Theses

Tendrescopic Endeavors and other Dynamics is an attempt to coalesce the ideas and skills that have been flying around my studio over the course of the last year into a single project. A trip to Storm King Art Center and ideas of modular making began a cycle of exploration into the way custom fittings could create light-weight and transportable sculptures. Developing a greater ability to digital model and create my own unique parts has been the charge that I have built this work upon. Science and the devices that facilitate scientific discovery act as the embodiment of the desire to …

The Void Between Us, Xiaofan Fan

Masters Theses

This thesis investigates the sense of connection and detachment among people. The interference with sight and physical placement of the body are the two aspects that this thesis researches upon. Through a discussion of life and death, the research is able to take form in the architecture realm with a crematorium as the final deliverable.

Embedded Processors On Fpga: Hard-Core Vs Soft-Core, Vivek J. Vazhoth Kanhiroth

Masters Theses

Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are integrated circuits (ICs) that can be reprogrammed by the consumer after manufacturing. They are based on a matrix of configurable logic blocks connected via programmable interconnects that enables the designer to quickly recreate hardware circuits. In the past, FPGAs were primarily used for prototyping and debugging purposes. However, with their increased popularity, many commercial products now incorporate FPGAs.

In the late 1990s, FPGA vendors introduced System-on-chip (SoC) devices that housed one or more hard-core processors and an FPGA fabric on a single IC to allow for more complex designs that involved hardware and software …

Black Male Persistence Through Stereotypes In College, Taylor B. H. Boyd

Masters Theses

Stereotypes create threatening environments for Black males on campus causing social, psychological, and academic effects of Black male collegiate success. The theoretical underpinnings of stereotype threat and critical race theory drive this study and explain where stereotypes derive from and how they create threatening environments for stereotyped Black male collegians. In addition, this thesis seeks to break the deficit narrative surrounding Black males in college. In doing so, this study highlights how Black males persist through stereotypes and the threatening environments they create in both academic and social settings in college. The qualitative phenomenological research design captures the lived experiences …

Reasons For Their Departure: A Look At Undergraduate Women Who Abandon Stem Majors, Nicole S. Rombach

Masters Theses

Despite surpassing undergraduate men in degree completion, undergraduate women are still underrepresented in certain STEM majors and depart from these fields at higher rates. Much of the existing research on this topic, however, is quantitative in nature and conducted at large research institutions. This study sought to gain a better understanding of the reasons why undergraduate women switched from STEM to non-STEM majors at a large, Midwest liberal arts institution. A qualitative, phenomenological design was used to identify the reasons students identify as important in their decision to switch majors, the ways in which gender might have been tied to …

Information Theoretic Eeg Analysis Of Children With Severe Disabilities In Response To Power Mobility Training: A Pilot Study, Joshua O. Usoro

Masters Theses

Studies have shown that self-initiated locomotion in infants and young children is paramount to developing motor skills, social skills, and visuospatial perception. Because children with multiple, severe disabilities are often not able to produce movement on their own due to limited motor control, access to a power mobility device may be vital to their overall development. This study extends data analysis from an exploratory study, and investigates the use of information theoretics in providing objective measures to characterize changes in electroencephalograms (EEG) as a result of power mobility training, and relates these changes to observed rehabilitation outcomes. Three subjects with …

Reaching Transcendental Meditation Followers For Jesus: Christian Meditation And Cultural Contextualization, Ashley Boyles

Masters Theses

The purpose of this thesis is to build on to research pertaining to Christian meditation, the Transcendental Meditation movement, and theological contextualization for possible evangelism strategy to reach adherents of TM. The first chapter begins with the purpose of the thesis as well as its limitations and research methods to be involved, with a layout of the rest of the thesis. In the second chapter, the literature review examines material from several different perspectives: Christianity, TM, the TM turned Christian, and the nonreligious field of science. The third chapter includes historical background on Transcendental Meditation, its interaction with Western culture, …

The Role Of Metastasis Suppressor Cd82 In The Deactivation Of The C-Met Signaling Pathway In Prostate Cancer, Katie L. Uhl

Masters Theses

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: Prostate cancer is the second leading cause of cancer deaths among men in the United States. Metastasis plays a major role in patient prognosis and treatment options. One of the factors that influences metastasis is the activation of the c-Met signaling pathway. Activation of the growth factor c-Met results in cytoskeletal rearrangement, migration, and invasion. Previous studies have shown CD82 to act as an active metastatic suppressor in normal, healthy cells and is downregulated in various forms of cancer. When CD82 is re-expressed in cancer cells, the cells no longer express metastatic characteristics. The purpose of this …

Satellite Sequencing Optimization And Observational Orbit Determination Using Genetic Algorithms, Andrew W. Verstraete

Masters Theses

The problem of mission design for a robotic servicing satellite in geosynchronous Earth orbit (GEO) was investigated. A representative set of potential client satellites was selected, and operational needs were randomly assigned based on the average number of GEO retirements, anomalies, and repositioning maneuvers that currently occur each year. An objective function was developed to represent the value of servicing mission sequences, including client fees, time penalties, and operational risk. A genetic algorithm was then used to find sequences of operations on the potential client set that maximized the objective function’s value. Scenarios were analyzed with the database of satellites …

Revisiting The One-Sided Ewma Control Chart Design, Duy Anh Duong-Tran

Masters Theses

Over the past half-century, Exponential Weighted Moving Average (EWMA) control charts have been widely used in Statistical Process Control to detect small and persistent process shifts. In theory, EWMA control limits monotonically increase over time to account for the continual growth of the EWMA statistic’s variance. These control limits are often assumed constant and are set to their respective asymptotic limits. While not theoretically correct, this simplifies the process of applying and analyzing the EWMA control chart while having little effect on the chart’s performance. One-Sided EWMA charts are often implemented when it is only desirable to detect shifts in …

Development Of An Effective Portable And Flexible Glove For Hand Tremor Suppression, Abdulrahem Turkistani

Masters Theses

This paper presents the work carried out in designing and developing a prototype for a tremor suppression system that reduces hand tremor by counteracting vibrations initiated from a patient’s shaking hand. This system includes a glove with a built-in vibration simulation module that oscillates and mimics the hand vibration. The oscillation is generated by a DC motor mounted on the top of the glove, and can vary in degree of vibration. The glove is also equipped with an accelerometer-gyroscope based micro-electromechanical system (MEMS) and vibrating coin motors mounted on each finger, both interfaced with a microcontroller. The microcontroller used in …

Security And Privacy In Cloud Computing, Ramakrishnan Krishnan

Masters Theses

Cloud computing (CC) gained a widespread acceptance as a paradigm of computing. The main aim of CC is to reduce the need for customers' investment in new hardware or software by offering flexible cloud services, with a user reaping the benefits of the pay per use approach. CC demands addressing many security and privacy issues: both problems (vulnerabilities, threats, and attacks) and solutions (controls). The thesis discusses all these classes of problems and solutions, categorizing them as either security-related issues, privacy-related issues, or intertwined security and privacy issues. The main contributions of the thesis are twofold: first, using the …