Digital Commons Network^™

Foveate, Dahlia Aggarwal

Masters Theses

This thesis investigates how textiles can unsettle visual assumptions, encouraging a perceptual shift. Through weaving, upholstery, and spatial installation, the work stages a tension between what a surface appears to be and how it is encountered by the body. Through woven pattern, tactile texture, and trompe l’oeil textile surfaces, perception is something negotiated rather than fixed: the eye anticipates one reality while the hand discovers another.

Drawing on a range of sensations gathered from observing landscape formations and textures, it translates enduring scale and material qualities into an interior landscape of woven surfaces and textile-based furniture. Rather than serving as …

Strata: Portraits Of The Alvarado & The Southwest, Kayla R. Duncan

Masters Theses

History isn't the past; it is a continuing unfolding of the moment, yet we cannot feel time. We see traces of age through patina on copper, the wrinkles on a face from decades of laughter, or the holes in your favorite shirt. Similarly within architecture, what remains: ruins and fragments serve as layers that indicate the passage of time. In what ways are these layers exposed? Hidden? Erased? How do we determine what layers are worthy to be erased, maintained, or glorified as use of a structure or place continues to evolve through time?

The history of Albuquerque spans the …

Held In Sediment, Kati Lowe

Masters Theses

This thesis examines time as a durational, non-linear condition shaped through emotion and perception rather than a sequence of forward-moving events. Through painting and related material strategies, the work focuses on aftermath, residue, interruption, and return. Throughout this thesis, terms such as misalignment, double vision, fragmentation, interruption, and recurrence function as a conceptual vocabulary for describing instability within memory, embodiment, and lived experience. Blurred edges, doubled forms, and punctures in the surface register a lag between experience and comprehension, especially in relation to grief, trauma, depression, memory, and embodied perception. Neon color functions as a counterpoint to delay, signaling persistence, …

Deep Cuts: Bearing Witness To The Erosion Of Evidence, Maya Lakshmi Srinivasan Md

Masters Theses

In my Master of Fine Arts thesis in Printmaking at the Rhode Island School of Design, I examine the intersection of my dual practices as a general surgery resident and artist. Both disciplines require precision, incision, and tactility to navigate the human condition. My art practice is a method of processing the emotional toll of surgical training and the simultaneous societal erosion of scientific authority. My thesis work focuses on challenging the rise of medical pseudoscience and anti-intellectualism. The focal piece in this installation, In Tallow We Trust, consists of three woodblock relief prints at the scale of an …

Femmage Work, Mary Elizabeth Alford

Masters Theses

“Femmage Work”‭ ‬is a furniture collection that explores the relationship between adornment‭, ‬structure‭, ‬and feminine material culture‭. ‬Borrowing‭ ‬from materials‭, ‬practices‭, ‬and objects that are generally viewed as‭ ‬ feminine‭, ‬I seek to shift the perception of these objects and materials away from mere surface beauty‭, ‬an assumption that connotes a lack of taste‭, ‬depth‭, ‬and seriousness‭.‬‭ ‬

The purpose of this work to foster a collective sense of unity by adopting feminine typologies that‭ ‬ represent a shared experience‭. ‬It is meant to‭ ‬ cultivate the experience of‭ ‬‘girlhood’‭ ‬by using‭ ‬ historical feminine material culture and craft in …

See Small, Know Big, Zairan Liu

Masters Theses

A great man 見微知著 (see small, know big). — Hanfeizi

My thesis explores how an ordinary person (who likes birds and technology) practices this method in graphic design.

見 see
Observe and pay attention. To stay with something long and close enough that it stops being ordinary.

微 the small
My work begins with small entry points: a word, an observation, an interface.

知 know
To learn, to place one thing next to another and understand the overlap or collision.

著 the large
What systems are at work, who designed it, how it got here.

I want to use this …

Circling, Eun Yong Lee

Masters Theses

This thesis explores Korean aesthetic sensibilities from the perspective of material logic, placing at its core the process of reinterpreting and materializing them. Here, ※material logic§ refers to the relationships among materials that emerge from a particular group＊s accumulated understanding of materials, as well as from the ways in which they combine and use them.

Ambient Furniture, Andrew T. Goulet

Masters Theses

The designed object communicates an idea. Might that idea be an insight? This thesis seeks an ambient furniture of durable insight: objects that reward attention without demanding it, cultivating the conditions for a contemplative practice of everyday life.

Design is the materialization of mind. Through the conception and creation of things, thoughts are given form. Of all forms of thought, insight is the most precious. Insight contains within it the seed of transformation: to see into what was previously opaque.

Insight is empirical. It cannot be directly transmitted. It must be observed first-hand, rediscovered by each successive generation and translated …

Useful Useless Object, Jisu Han Jung

Masters Theses

If spicy ramyun is spicy for others but not for me, is it still spicy

ramyun? This question begins Useful Useless Object, my investigation

into furniture as a site where function, perception, and value are

constantly negotiated rather than fixed. From this question, I

explore how meaning is shaped by the unstable relationship between

object and user. In furniture, usefulness is often treated as an

objective standard, measured by comfort, efficiency, or practicality.

However, this project argues that usefulness is never universal;

it is subjective, relational, and dependent on individual experience,

expectation, and desire.

Through making objects that sit between …

The Right To Withdraw: Soft Boundaries And Material Refuge In The Workplace, Zhihao (Sky) Xing

Masters Theses

Traditionally, architecture has provided physical protection through solid structures and defined boundaries, while modern interior spaces have evolved further to serve function, efficiency, and the operational needs of society. These include open-plan offices, art school studios, and other public spaces like libraries. Although physical rigidity and operational efficiency have been well served by the modern built environment, the psychological experiences of those within it remain largely overlooked - a lack of privacy, emotional support, and space for emotional withdrawal.

This research explores why contemporary workplaces often expose individuals to sensory overload and why people often retreat to stairwells, restrooms, or …

Breathing Structures: Hygroscopicity Of Fibers., Nawal Urooj

Masters Theses

Cities like Singapore, Mumbai, Karachi, and regions of Ghana experience persistently hot and humid climates. In these regions, humidity in built environments significantly affects both human comfort and the durability of building materials. Yet traditional mechanical dehumidification strategies are energy-intensive, environmentally taxing, and socially uneven in their accessibility. We must challenge the existing systems for thermal comfort, the inefficient role Architecture plays in it, and the socio-economic politics associated with thermal comfort in developing countries.

Karachi, a coastal city in the south of Pakistan, has extremely high relative humidity and high temperatures throughout most of the year. In this region, …

2'X2' : Situating Cohabitation, Liz B. Shepherd

Masters Theses

2’ x 2’ : Situating Cohabitation explores how we might approach conversion by examining the relationship between content and container. In the wake of technological innovation and remote work, many office buildings have become vacant, leaving spacious, unresolved shells available for alternative forms of habitation. This thesis considers how existing spatial conditions and inherited narratives can be reassembled to reconfigure social norms, while also offering occupants agency in shaping how they live. Ultimately, the program examines our relation to living and how we contend with our belongings.

Crowd Control, Dalia Sadeq

Masters Theses

The relentless and inevitable expansion of the Masjid Al Haram is the premise of my thesis. Hajj and pilgrim growth are constants, demanding continuous growth of tawaf grounds. The centrifugal power of the Kaaba has always posed an existential threat to the buildings in its radius. The Al Saud monarchy has shepherded both demolition of nearby buildings and construction of the Masjid Al Haram. The monarchy aims for 30 million pilgrims annually, a Vision 2030 initiative.

My thesis visualises the inevitable expansion of the tawaf paths of Masjid Al Haram. The paths are horizontal, radial, and stretch over the landscape …

Negotiating The Shoreline, Shuqi Hu

Masters Theses

This research examines sea otter reintroduction in Coos Bay as a spatial and temporal conflict between ecological processes and human activities. Through mapping and analysis, it identifies key misalignments between infrastructure, ecological rhythms, and human use.

Focusing on points of proximity, the project tests how landscape design can create conditions of visibility and engagement with coastal ecologies.

Rather than resolving large-scale conflicts, it proposes site-specific interventions that foster empathy and support adaptive relationships between human and non-human systems.

Boring Objects Bureau, Eric Fan

Masters Theses

The Boring Objects Bureau is an anti-sustainability design studio. Through its work, the Bureau is interested in developing new strategies that can challenge the stereotypes of what sustainability looks like for the products that underpin our modern lives.

The Bureau’s first investigation focused on the smartphone, a product where breakage and decay through obsolescence is inevitable. As a result, people are faced with either the expected sustainable approach of repair, which can be expensive and inconvenient, or replacement, which costs more and restarts the cycle. The Bureau therefore wanted to ask: could this breakage and decay instead be embraced as …

Where The Walls Came Down: Reimagining The Disaster-Induced Modern Ruin, Zhenmi Tang

Masters Theses

In contemporary society, large-scale destructive events are continuously generating a new architectural condition: the modern ruin. Unlike historical ruins shaped and legitimized through time, the remnants left by war, wildfires, and other natural disasters remain embedded in lived reality and collective memory. These environments are not distant artifacts of the past, but recently inhabited spaces whose material presence and social meaning remain active. However, prevailing reconstruction practices tend to prioritize complete demolition and site clearance, followed by rebuilding on restored empty ground. While this approach provides reliability in terms of safety, engineering, and regulation, it often interrupts the material and …

Care Ecologies Between Knots, Eliza R. Marris

Masters Theses

Discarded fibers like raw wool behave the way harm reduction does. Harm reduction resists stigma and works to move beyond assumptions and oversimplifications of substance use and addiction. Wool is irregular, complicated, and emotionally charged. It resists compression and maintains its own being even when pulled apart. Working with raw wool is in relationship with complexity, as is harm reduction.

At its core, harm reduction is grounded in thoughtfulness and empathy towards people, their lived experience, and its nuances. It is a witness to lives, memories, and imprints, acknowledging the entangled realities of addiction. Our detachment from fiber remainders, materials …

After Yellow Horse: From Passive Shelter To A Self-Sustaining Cycle, Xinyuan Liu

Masters Theses

Spatial flexibility—specifically, the ability of a single building to shift between therapeutic and productive use—offers a critical alternative to the institutional passivity of conventional care facilities, repositioning architecture as an active agent in both the financial sustainability of nonprofit organizations and the social recovery of their patients.

During my time volunteering at Yellow Horse Equine Therapy Center in Ashaway, Rhode Island, the core contradictions of the traditional equine therapy model became visible firsthand. Yellow Horse had operated for years on goodwill and volunteers. The daily reality of the facility was one of persistent understaffing: barn chores, groundskeeping, and routine maintenance …

Feeling Through Space:Designing Emotion In Space Through Alice In Wonderland, Xuanyu Yang

Masters Theses

Emotion is the most direct bridge between human experience and architectural space, but design often treats feelings as a side product. This thesis challenges that idea by asking a specific question: can a designer intentionally use spatial qualities to move a person through a defined emotional sequence? And if so, can that process be documented clearly enough to become a repeatable method?

To test this, the project designs a spatial version of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland as an immersive theater experience. The narrative is not told through text, performance, or screen, but entirely through the physical qualities of a …

Lace Memory Lab, Xinyu Han

Masters Theses

Lace, originally developed from European religious garments, has long been treated as a decorative and secondary textile craft. With its delicate hand-weaving, intricate patterns, and lightweight quality, lace has been widely used in clothing and furniture, it has always remained at the edge of spatial design. This thesis focuses on lace as a material memory, exploring how its characteristics can be translated into architectural language and integrated into the spatial practice of adaptive reuse of old buildings. When I think of lace, I notice the similar nature of its craftsmanship and spatial concepts.

What happens when lace is no longer …

Providence Puzzle:Exhibition Design As Urban Spatial Practice, Ye Chen

Masters Theses

Providence is a city shaped by past industrial production, immigrant communities, artistic practice, waterfront renewal, and urban redevelopment. Its identity exists not only in historical remnants, but also in the cultural atmosphere created through the ongoing interaction between past and present. Former factories, river infrastructure, neighborhood streets, public parks and scenes of everyday life together form an urban narrative that continues to evolve. Yet existing methods of presenting Providence’s history and culture remain limited to informational signage, commemorative markers, or one-directional communication, offering little incentive for people to stop, read, explore, or actively engage. As a city rich in both …

Fallen Leaves:The Unseen, Forgotten, Presences That Live In Us, Juhee Cho

Masters Theses

The fallen leaf is a material figure of the unseen, forgotten moments that have made us and holds us still while remaining outside our sight. In urban environments, fallen leaves are managed as seasonal waste, collected and quickly separated from everyday encounter. Yet within ecological systems, they continue to participate in cycles of regeneration, becoming the soil that sustains new life. This quiet continuation is unavailable to the eye, yet known by the body. As a proof of this, the leaf’s transformation reveals itself not to the mind, but to the hand. The curling fiber wears out, the deepening brown, …

Domesticating Duration, Xiaoyu Lan

Masters Theses

Inspired by the novel Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman, this thesis explores the subjective human perception of time. To break away from the monotonous product display model of traditional retail, the design transforms a four-story building into a novel experiential showroom infused with avant-garde exhibition qualities. Using the "home" as a narrative thread, the design guides visitors through everyday domestic scenes—the bedroom, living room, bathroom, and dining room. These spaces are deconstructed into four distinct experiences of temporal flow: Pause, Fast-Forward, Slow-Motion, and Rewind. Guided by Peter Zumthor's Atmospheres and referencing relevant artworks, the design translates the abstract concept of …

The Amplifier: Small Spaces, Loud Futures, Szewai Hong

Masters Theses

Once nicknamed “Rock City,” Allston, MA has long been a creative hub known for its grassroots music culture. Historically the neighborhood has been home to many independent music spaces, nurturing generations of musicians. Relentless real estate development, the expansion of nearby institutions and ongoing inflation, has made the neighborhood increasingly unaffordable for the creatives and forced many to leave, diluting the once vibrant music community. Simultaneously, the shift toward digital music consumption has contributed to the disappearance of physical spaces where people once gathered to discover, discuss, and experience music collectively.

This thesis responds to these circumstances through an intervention …

Healing In The Flow: Reimagining Public Well-Being Through The Adaptive Reuse Of The Heritage Park Visitor Center, Yaqi Zhang

Masters Theses

This thesis proposes the adaptive reuse of the Heritage Park Visitor Center in Fall River, Massachusetts, as a community oriented environment for rest, care, and social connection along the Taunton River waterfront. Although the park provides public access to nature, the existing building does not support everyday forms of well being such as pause, reflection, quiet recovery, or informal gathering. In many public spaces across New England, wellness remains separated from civic life and is often treated as private, specialized, or secondary.

In response, the project rethinks self care not as a private luxury, but as a shared spatial condition …

Within The Archive: Jewelry And The Poetics Of Historical Trace, Fusheng Zhong

Masters Theses

Jewelry is a poetic translator, through which my intense and complex engagement with history is materialized. By reinterpreting the classical Chinese poem Bring the Wine(Li Bai,752) through paper-based materials, I translate poetry infused with personal traces and a distinct stance into wearable objects that embody the weight of history.

Through jewelry, an art form carried in close proximity to the body, I engage with history by staging acts of document visualization, transforming poems and archival fragments into visual and tactile records.  I suggest that in conditions of informational overload, individuals may gravitate toward reductive positions in order to avoid being …

The Marathon Without Running: Experiencing A Runner's Sensorial Journey, Harin Kim

Masters Theses

The marathon is defined not by motion alone, but by the changing conditions a body moves through—and remains within—over time. Breath, cadence, heat, sound, crowd compression and attention fluctuate, producing phases that structure the race from within. These interior states are difficult to access by spectators from the sidelines, yet they are precisely what shape the runner’s experience.

This thesis begins with a simple but unconventional question: How can an exhibition translate the runner’s physical sensations and emotions into a multidimensional experience for spectators who do not run? Through a sequence of pop-up exhibitions placed along the New York City …

How To Make A Jumpsuit, Xue Huang

Masters Theses

Through interdisciplinary artistic research combining illustration, embroidery, garment construction, and installation, this thesis investigates how patriarchal narratives become internalized within the female body and disconnect women from embodied forms of feminine knowledge and vitality.

Drawing from Michel Foucault’s theories of disciplinary power, Jungian psychology, Traditional Chinese Medicine, and feminist writings by Audre Lorde and Karina Blancarte, the project examines how systems of productivity, control, and gendered ideology shape both psychological experience and bodily perception.

The thesis culminates in a large-scale textile installation titled How to Make a Jumpsuit, consisting of embroidered silk panels, commercial jumpsuit pattern pieces, meridian imagery, sculptural …

Aer, Qiyi Cai

Masters Theses

I began this project from a recurring perception: that simple, everyday elements carry distinct and often unexpected qualities. For me, the number six is green and tastes like grapes; the number two feels deep blue. Even bottled water from different brands seems to possess specific forms of character, some sharp, some rounded, some soft like cotton. I first encountered the word synesthesia in elementary school writing classes, where it was introduced as a literary device frequently used in classical poetry and prose. For instance, a gentle rain might be described as “soft as pastry,” translating a visual phenomenon into tactile …

Draw To Breathe, Ranran Ma

Masters Theses

This thesis explores visual expression in drawing as an intuitive mode of thinking suited to everyday life—a form of expression that runs parallel to language and surpasses it.

The project begins with a daily Post-it note drawing practice. These drawings often emerge before conscious understanding, subsequently accompanied by brief text, allowing image and word to resonate through emotion and intuition. Through the use of small-scale, portable, low-pressure materials, and with immediacy and intuitive freedom as the foundation of making, a visual language system grounded in the self develops. Through this sustained practice, I developed an instruction-based card system titled Draw …