Digital Commons Network^™

Rooted In Topsoil, Jiaying Wang

Masters Theses

Disillusioned by my transnational identity, I have come to realize that my sense of belonging is no longer attached to any physical location, but instead to a state of mind, to an intimacy with the world. My notion of home is an obscure and unsettled—at times utopian—idea, which can be infinitely decoded, re-positioned and re-established psychologically. This thesis is an investigation of that liminal state, questioning the paradoxical place at the intersection of longing and belonging, interior and exterior, rootedness and uprootedness. Through a collection of short essays that accompany projects, I seek to unpack the precarious emotional complexities that …

Moretheless, Abdelghani Alnahawi

Masters Theses

material investigations becoming questions with interjections

From John Street To Union, Andrew Shea

Masters Theses

I have been making paintings constructed loosely from my experience of walking about one mile each morning from my apartment in Fox Point to my studio in downtown Providence, and of walking back each night. My goal is to rediscover the feeling of these outdoor places—their lights, atmospheres, colors, and topographies—through the process of painting inside the studio. As such, the visual representations of these paintings are not straight-forward and objective, but oblique and affective.

I hope that these works draw one’s attention to the idiosyncrasies of natural life and to the particularities of weather. I want the paintings to …

Fungi In Flux | Designing Regenerative Materials And Products With Mycelium, Arvind Bhallamudi

Masters Theses

As the world grapples with the escalating crisis of climate threats and environmental degradation, this research delves into the synergistic potential of design and biology, developing safe and sustainable materials for applications in prototyping, furniture and interior design. Harnessing the power of a unique organism - fungi, the study proposes an accessible, efficient, and resilient material resource system. It utilizes local waste streams and mycelium (the vegetative part of fungi) to grow functional structures. An experimental and small-scale protocol is modeled by testing bio-fabrication and bio-printing methods. The composites' performance qualities and characteristics are evaluated through mechanical testing and a …

Making Then Meaning, Ben Denzer

Masters Theses

This is an artist talk contained within a book. It is 816 pages and 49 minutes long. Closed captions run across the spreads. A video of this talk can be watched on bendenzer.com/making-then-meaning

At RISD, I’ve been prompted to expand the scope and tools of my practice and to reflect on questions of meaning in my work.

I spend my days making things, but I’ve never really had good answers to questions of why I make the things I make, or what their meaning is. I don’t think there are simple answers to these questions.

I think meaning comes from …

Norteada- En Busca De Un Nuevo Norte. Cocoon Portals And The Negotiation Of Space., Kimberly Ayala Najera

Masters Theses

ACT 1

The symbiotic relationship between the turtle and butterfly through lachryphagy, where the butterfly gathers nutrients through drinking the tears of the turtle, brings us to an abandoned turtle shell, our site of exploration. Our turtle friend has long since passed, leaving behind an empty shell that’s become developed and inhabited.

En nuestro analisis de border, to borderland, we arrive at border creep. Border creep, o la fluencia de la frontera, perpetua la tierra fronteriza mas alla y se convierte en una experiencia encarnada.

“Soy una tortuga donde quiera que vaya llevo a casa en mi espalda.”

-Gloria Anzaldua, …

Access In Ambiguity, Moritz Lónyay

Masters Theses

The wealth of color present in nature has long been a major source of inspiration for works of art and design. Yet as more species become extinct due to habitat loss, climate change and unchecked hunting, will we face a less colorful, more monotonous future? How will this impact art and design and how could either be utilized as tools to counteract the loss of color? This thesis speculates upon such a future by the sixth wave of mass extinction and instigates a movement that celebrates color. Growing up in the Anthropocene, the first geological epoch in which human existence …

How To Make A Hybrid Workplace More Human?, Ray Sun

Masters Theses

After COVID-19 hit, a new working method has appeared, the remote workers have an opportunity sitting at home attending zoom meetings and getting job done. While companies initially turned to remote work out of necessity, they soon realized that employees could remain productive while working from home. As the world began to reopen, many companies chose to continue with hybrid or fully remote working situations.

However, hybrid work has created challenges for maintaining a sense of collaboration and connection. Can this discomfort caused by telecommunication be solved by new tech involved? Designers are currently exploring various products and devices to …

Mini Makers: Designing Curriculum For Community-Based Arts Education, Hayden Goldberg

Masters Theses

This work serves as documentation of my experience planning and teaching classes for a Rhode Island based after school visual arts pro- gram. Through arts-based action research, I explore methods of documentation and material exploration in order to create an adaptive, emergent curriculum that is responsive to a community-oriented arts education setting.

Eviction To Placement: Rethinking The Current Supportive Housing Systems For Hidden Homeless Families, Fang-Min Liou

Masters Theses

This thesis focuses on repurposing unoccupied office space into affordable housing systems tailored to meet the unique needs of homeless families. Families with children make up 36 percent of the homeless population overall and children’s homelessness status is almost always “hidden." Architecture and design can play a vital role in addressing social inequity by creating improved living environments for the houseless community through adaptive reuse of underutilized space situated within dense urban areas with the greatest access to resources to support these families, evoke feelings of comfort, security, and hope.

The following thesis accommodates three basic needs of homeless families: …

Investigating Disparities And Safety Equity In Pedestrian Nighttime Crashes In Michigan, Sia Isaria Mwende

Masters Theses

For the past eleven years (2011 - 2021) in Michigan, 76 percent of all fatal pedestrian crashes occurred at night. Over the same period, about 36 percent of pedestrian nighttime crashes were fatal or incapacitating (KA), while only 25 percent of daytime pedestrian crashes were fatal or incapacitating (KA). Previous studies suggest that, overall, poor neighborhoods and racial minorities are associated with more pedestrian crashes. With more fatal and incapacitating pedestrian crashes occurring at night, it is imperative to examine how these crashes are distributed by economic status and racial makeup. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the racial and …

Final Songs: Music And The Voice In Nier Replicant Ver. 1.22474487139..., Haden Douglass Plouffe

Masters Theses

This thesis analyzes the soundtrack to the 2021 game NieR: Replicant Ver. 1.22474487139…, examining its approach to character leitmotif and the centrality of the voice as an expressive and dramatic layer of the soundtrack. The NieR series has received considerable acclaim for its music, with 2017’s NieR: Automata gaining widespread critical and commercial success that has led to a wave of scholarly analysis of it. This document analyzes Replicant, the previous game in the series, through the experiential framework of a player, highlighting how the game recontextualizes themes through repeated playthroughs, and on the strong link that the soundtrack’s vocals …

Copper-Indazolate Nanojars: Synthesis And Characterization, Nicholas Alexander Rudell

Masters Theses

The field of synthetic supramolecular chemistry has exploded since the first syntheses of crown ethers by Charles Pedersen in the 1960s, leading to further development in the area of macrocycles and incorporation into a vast array of metal-organic structures. Supramolecular chemistry came to the forefront of science with the 1987 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, awarded jointly to Donald J. Cram, Jean-Marie Lehn, and Charles Pedersen “for their development and use of molecules with structure-specific interactions of high selectivity.”

Nanojars are supramolecular metal-organic complexes with a high affinity for hydrophilic anions and can efficiently transfer such anions from water into organic …

On The Power Of Attainable Architecture Community Engagement And Interaction Through Architecture: A New Approach To Architectural Exhibitions, Jianing Yang

Masters Theses

This thesis explores the potential of architecture exhibitions as a medium to make architecture more accessible and relevant to the public. Drawing inspiration from an article titled "6 Small Scale Projects with Large Social Impact", it highlights the significance of small-scale architectural interventions that foster social responsibility, public engagement, and sustainability.

The prevalent architectural elitism often overlooks attainable, small-scale architecture, which advocates for a broader appreciation of architecture, including the everyday built environments that shape our communities and everyday lives.

The thesis proposes a new approach to architecture exhibitions emphasizing authentic immersion and engagement. It introduces a unique 1:1 experience …

Reorientation, Soleil Nguyen

Masters Theses

A non-linear narrative to understand the place and character of my neighborhood.

A Day Stood Still, Yuting Sun

Masters Theses

The Brooklyn Navy Yard is an important industrial historic site in New York City. It was established in the 1810s as a private shipyard and became a military property in the late nineteenth century. It provided significant production capacity for the Pacific battlefield during World War II. After the war, the entire campus closed in the 1960s as military orders declined and transportation changed. The Brooklyn Navy Yard was later sold to New York City and repurposed.

After the city government took over the park, unlike other industrial sites that were developed as real estate, manufacturing is still the main …

Step 10, Jinhong Cai

Masters Theses

Step 10 is an experiment on provoking empathy through

abstracted elements within my studio practice. I am

proposing to craft an emotional piece without leaning

on my identity. This written thesis consists of two parts:

narrative prose and an explanation of my studio practice.

While the installation is entirely devoid of cultural or

personal references, this text-based thesis is full of them

because it is intended to inform whoever is interested in

learning more about the motive behind this creation.

The questions I bought into the thought and creation

process are: Can a piece of art still successfully bring

out …

Spaces Of Wait And Their Weight, Eman Alhashemi

Masters Theses

i have been exploring, researching and observing what influences affect a space within the traditions, rituals, food, thoughts and behavior. what happens when that space of comfort disappears and changes? through a series of work that waits, melts, merges, and exaggerates in am attempt to find its place. as i borrow objects and movements from daily life observing my surroundings and extracting mundane things that take on different forms whether exaggerated or unidentifiable. this recent culmination of work over the two years at risd look at objects and spaces of waiting, discomfort, longing and sharing. our behavior is affected by …

Migratory Material: Epigenetics & Weaving At The Us-Mexico Border, Valerie Navarrete

Masters Theses

Discourse often sutures the body shut, disallowing representations of identity to outgrow sociopolitical interests. This issue may originate from borders, but also from the unnamable pathology that generational colonial trauma transmits to the mind, body, and environment. Without a direct form of translatability, this thesis proposes a new materialism that deviates from any object-oriented ontology. Untethered and intra-active, epigenetics and weaving represent objects that transform typical ways of knowing and seeing. Their sensitivity to the environment, in addition to their mobility across generations of time, broaden the spatiotemporal loci of the body and its embodiment. Proposing new materials that expand …

Flores, Rigoberto Flores

Masters Theses

My name is Rigoberto Flores and I was born in Guerrero, Mexico. The work I make involves politics, immigration, cartel violence and religious themes. I’m interested in presenting these challenging and difficult concepts, to have them remain in the public consciousness. The work I produce involve charcoal drawings, textiles, print, and painting. The work I create is intended to address inconstancies in established ideas, usually involving government violence. Throughout history art has been used to promote institutional propaganda. I am searching to do the same, but to oppose those structures.

Finding Hope, April Renae Musekamp

Masters Theses

Hope Diaz is a young military spouse who prefers baking to people. Her husband has just died while he was serving overseas. In her overwhelming grief, Daisy has to decide where she will live after her time in base housing runs out and what she will do to support herself. She finds solace in a local grief support group, but will her tenuous relationship with her mother comfort her through continuing loss? Hope accepts a job offer from an old baking instructor, but that means leaving behind her support system and places full of memories with her husband. Things don’t …

Money People: An Examination Of Wealthy Characters In Fiction, Morgan (Yeatts) Eley

Masters Theses

This thesis seeks to examine the similarities (or dissimilarities) of wealthy characters in fiction, specifically studying two well-known wealthy characters: Mr. Darcy from Pride and Prejudice and Jay Gatsby from The Great Gatsby. The study examined the first impressions of these characters, their attitudes toward others, their physicalities and presences, and how they spent their money. These examinations yielded fairly similar results between the two characters, as discussed in depth within the thesis. The most obvious similarity was the way the authors wrote their characters in a “set apart” manner, creating a division between them and the other characters. While …

Beyond The Long Walk: Appealing To A Target Audience Through Genre Choice And Manuscript Length, Stacie Ann Sudkamp

Masters Theses

Creatively writing specifically for a narrow target audience has not historically been the modus operandi of most authors. The usual recommendation has been to allow a story’s characters to determine plot direction, story length, and genre. My Artist Statement explains my motivation for creating a manuscript that appeals, specifically, to servicemembers and veterans coping with PTSD and suicidal ideation. Furthermore, the research expanded upon in my Critical Paper supports my decision to create a hybrid, or mixed genre, novella in order to capture and hold the attention of my target audience in a unique way. I accomplish this by first …

Armed Adventurers: A Perspective On The Remembered Past Of The Battle Of Coleto Creek And The Goliad Massacre, Steven Linwood Sullivan

Masters Theses

From the Texas Revolution, 1835-1836, the Alamo looms larger than life over the other battles of the six-month conflict. The men resolved to die at the Alamo gained immortal fame and were enmeshed as the icons of a frontier identity. There is another story, however, that reveals the shattering of frontier ideals, and that is the Battle of Coleto Creek and the Goliad Massacre. How these two connected events have been remembered in the American mind has led to certain misconceptions of the Texian and Mexican sides of the Revolution. This is largely due to the American appeal of legend …

Torn Between The “Creeds Of The Devil”: The German-Finnish Co-Belligerency In World War Ii, Stephanie Megan Wright

Masters Theses

In an article for the Sunday Chronicle in June 1937, Winston Churchill described Nazism and Communism as “the creeds of the devil.” Caught between these two ideologies that “are at each other’s throats,” Finland attempted to remain a sovereign nation. This would prove to be virtually impossible after the November 1939 Soviet invasion of Finland. While Joseph Stalin and his advisors “expected [a] triumphal parade,” the dogged resistance of the Finnish Army and people “turned [that parade] into a bloody three-month war.” Furnished in the crucible of conflict, battling for their very existence as a nation, the Winter War united …

Promoting Mental Treatment In The Arab World, Aya Emam Hassanein

Masters Theses

This study investigates why mental health has been neglected in the Arab world and what strategies could be used to promote it and break the stigma associated with mental disorders. The literature review reveals that the most prominent barriers preventing mental treatment in the Arab world are cultural stigma, poverty, illiteracy, false beliefs regarding the causation of the illness, conflicts in countries, and a scarcity of mental health services and research. The review also discusses the most common mental illnesses in the Arab world and how the culture affects the process of treatment. Additionally, it discusses the possible solutions proposed …

Designs For Coping: Integrating Coping Strategies In Children's Medical Picture Books, Elizebeth Nicole Jones

Masters Theses

This study uses design to create a children’s medical picture book that is presented in first-person perspective through illustrations and text that teach children coping strategies for going to a medical visit. Many children fear what they do not understand. Children’s medical picture books are a useful tool to teach children coping strategies as well as what to expect from a visit to a doctor.

The Significance Of Teaching Music To Urban African-American Underprivileged Students, Tyreese L. Pleasanton

Masters Theses

This study delves into the significance of providing music education to African American students living in urban areas. By utilizing differentiated instructional techniques and reflective questioning, this study advocates for academic excellence and societal growth in music. The inquiry highlights the undeniable correlation between music education, cultural identity, and student prosperity. Thus, underscoring the critical importance of music for low-income students. Band directors can effectively support academic and musical success through diverse teaching approaches, such as method books and collaborative opportunities. The investigation carefully evaluated key factors, including the participants’ socioeconomic status, music development, and academic accomplishments. The research emphasized …

A Future For Foster Youth - Opening The Doors For The Next Generation, Marcus Alexander Grant

Masters Theses

The issue of foster children aging out of care and services has been an issue for quite some time. There are many concerns related to their care and needs. While in the foster care system, services and programs are typically tailored to help support these children and get them to 18 years old. College is often available and paid for to help those aging out of foster care, but what happens to those who do not take that path? College can be stressful and challenging for students with a strong support system. Those aging out of foster care often have …

Community Role Models And Their Influence On At-Risk-Youth, Eliab Charles Caudio

Masters Theses

The youth in our communities are easily influenced. For this reason, they should not be left to govern themselves. More often than not, they have a few peers steering them in the wrong directions, enabling poor decisions, mostly to fit in, stand out, or some form of protection. Also, there are those who simply have no direction, wanting to live fast, grow up before their time and engage in high risk behaviors they consider having fun. The focus of my research aims to drive home the point that “consistent mentorship from successful adults” is an often overlooked solution in helping …