Digital Commons Network^™

Carve, Release, Expand: A Spatial Exploration Of The Clandestine Music Spaces Of Chicago, Katie Lesh

Masters Theses

The architectural disciplines, and particularly that of landscape architecture and urban design, have shifted into focusing on “revival” of public and urban spaces but what does this truly mean? On the surface it can look like taking warehouse districts in a city and creating a master plan to turn them into artist villages or taking space underneath a highway to turn into a linear park. But what is lost in the process of doing so? The question is much bigger than myself but in the case of Chicago, the city has been home to vibrant music and art communities that …

Watershed Amendments: Assembling New Pervious Ground From Landscape Waste, Sophie Kaplan-Bucciarelli

Masters Theses

In Providence, Rhode Island, much of the downtown area is built over a vast historic tidal estuary. Though we no longer see the salt marshes, wooded bluffs, or meadows that once characterized this landscape, we recognize their absence in contemporary crises of urban heat, flooding, polluted soils and stormwater runoff, and habitat loss. These conditions are particularly acute along the city’s industrialized river corridors, where vacant lots and parking areas sit idle, their history paved over and potential constrained by limited imagination and resources.

These lots - already experiments in fill and land building after centuries of disturbance - can …

The Body Has Its Own Time, Wen Zhang

Masters Theses

In embodied practice, the artist’s experience and body become the medium through which thought and expression take form, not as illustration, but as primary material. Performance art has long occupied an unstable position within contemporary art: celebrated in retrospect, underfunded in practice, and selectively institutionalized. Its marginality has never been evenly distributed. Certain bodies, female, racialized, aging, non-normative, have remained further outside the archive than others, their work harder to collect, harder to value, and easier to forget. To work in performance, particularly as a woman, is to work within that contradiction.

For me, performance is less a form than …

Chronos | Kairos: Exploring Time Through Experimental Comics And Artist’S Books, Rhea Pradeep

Masters Theses

This thesis examines how the reading experience of comics changes when they are presented in various artist’s book formats, particularly through the lens of time and space. This project encourages the practice of close reading, arguing that the physical form of a book is not only a container for the content, but also plays a part in its meaning-making. It shifts the narrative pace, perception of time and reader engagement. Research in this paper is heavily influenced by scholars like Johanna Drucker, Scott McCloud and Will Eisner. This interdisciplinary, practice-led research combines narrative analysis of experimental comics, close reading of …

Lost In The Current, Yeying Wen

Masters Theses

Lost in the Current explores “imaginary reality” through the language of print. In my illustrative two-dimensional prints, small figures inhabit an imaginary world emphasizing human fragility, resilience, and emotional tension. Through etching, lithography, mezzotint, book arts, installation, and papermaking, I investigate how individuals respond to fear, conflict, and instability. To me, printmaking is a meditative process that allows me to slowly digest my overwhelming thoughts and emotions. By constructing expansive microcosms populated by fragile figures, I attempt to visualize psychological states such as fear and fragility, as well as notions of duality. My works are both personal and observational as …

Resistant Silence Engraved Trauma, Silence In Domestic Spaces, & Acts Of Resistance, Priyanka Kumar

Masters Theses

This thesis argues that silence surrounding trauma within domestic spaces is not merely an absence of speech or a condition of voicelessness, but it functions as an act of resistance. Focusing on domestic abuse within patriarchal structures, this research examines the ways trauma is embodied, negotiated, and concealed in everyday life. Central in this inquiry is the figure of the “sole witness” to abuse, those who live in close proximity to violence, endure its aftermath and negotiate survival through subtle and often unseen acts of resistance.

I am not attempting to define trauma, but the thesis explores the traces trauma …

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 …

Textile Tectonics: Weaving Memory, Body, And Belonging, Jennifer Stageberg

Masters Theses

This work delves into the idea of home as a sensory experience. Separating the feeling of home from the physical space of the house I aim to create new spaces that give the occupant autonomy and foster intimate connections with the material of the architecture. This is done with the hope of creating homes more attuned to the human body that provide a sense of belonging.

I propose repositioning the home as an intermediary space between our bodies and our surroundings. Approaching it through the lens of textiles to explore the sensory experience a home could provide. A series of …

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 …

Dead Reckoning, Jeremy A. Grail

Masters Theses

For over a century, conceptual, social, and legal frameworks have governed human relationships with technology by dematerializing data and personal information. From the early twentieth century, when human speech was converted into electrical pulses through telephone wires, to today’s pressure to integrate sensing, computation, and automation into every facet of contemporary life, electronic communications have become increasingly detached from the body and systematically defined as a weightless, immaterial asset.

This thesis refutes the industry-led myth of the “immaterial cloud” by revealing the presence and transmission of data to be a series of physical, tectonic, and spatial events that are woven …

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 …

Collecting Meaning: A Study On Collecting As An Artmaking Practice, Johanna Young

Masters Theses

This thesis explores how we practice creativity and construct narratives through the act of building collections. It examines collecting as both an innate creative impulse and a learned process. Using arts-based research and narrative inquiry, the study considers how our collecting habits reflect the ways we process information and express personal artistic interests. Drawing from personal experiences, this thesis mines the idea of the subconscious through the artistic lens of collecting.

Auxiliary Damage, Aiyi Cheng

Masters Theses

AuxiliarY DamagE asks what happens to pain when it is moved outside the body and given material form. Pain is not treated here as an image to be represented, but as something processed through repetition, pressure, exposure, and care. It is handled. Washed. Arranged. Pulled out. Swallowed back in.

Hair became the material that allowed this question to stay unstable. While attached to the body, it is intimate and ordinary. Once detached, it becomes residue, evidence, discomfort, value, and loss. In the studio, I washed collected hair, untangled it, threaded it through metal, placed it near flame, held it in …

1, 2, 2, 1, 1, 2, 1, 2, 2, 1, 2, 2, 1, 1, ..., Annemarie Torresen

Masters Theses

1

I invite you to see it and feel it and sit in it and breathe it in and

hold it in your lap. Art isn’t too scary, and neither is math.

2

bouncing between bounds of a binary

bippity boppity! let’s break brains and bread

balance or belly flop, what’s mine is yours:

bumptious and bumbling and barely able

i offer it broken and let you like it that way

The Found Stone Game, Magnolia Moskun

Masters Theses

This is not about masonry. This is stone architecture in constant motion.

I work with found stone in states of precarity, extracting discrete and sometimes surprising functions from each individual rock. Construction relies on physical forces while avoiding standardized building materials and methods.

Uncertainty is inherent. The builder is a perpetual novice, open to unexpected outcomes. Working with irregular stone takes incredible precision: it can’t be entirely planned or designed. The process is an inquiry into the deep physical understanding that can only be gained through hands-on work. This architecture rebels against the apathy in contemporary practice by deviating from …

Landscape Repositories: Mapping Post-Mining Narratives In Asbestos, Qc Val-Des-Sources, Qc, Rasha Lama

Masters Theses

Landscape Repositories: Mapping Social Narratives in Asbestos, QC Val-des-Sources, QC proposes the ‘landscape repository’ as a tool for landscape literacy and cultural legitimacy that integrates histories, geographies, and social narratives to inform grounded and place-based post-mining futures.

Val-des-Sources, Québec (formerly Asbestos, QC) is a place whose extraction legacies and material histories are deeply interwoven into its contemporary economy and cultural landscape. The centre of town is the Jeffrey Mine, once the world’s largest open-pit asbestos mine that is deep enough to hide the Eiffel Tower entirely. Ceased in 2012, the 130-year-old Jeffrey Mine and sixty-one other Québec asbestos sites once …

Rooted Retreat: Integrating Community Land Stewardship And Gardening Into Managed Retreat For Generational Connection To Place, Brooke E. Dutton

Masters Theses

Retreat from vulnerable floodplain landscapes is inevitable, and will only become a more pressing issue as climate change exacerbates flood risk. Unfortunately, it is a process that results in displacement of a community; people are uprooted from a place, and from each other. Post-retreat landscapes are largely converted to conservation land, re-naturalized floodplains, abandoned, ghostly neighborhoods, or public parks.

But this thesis wants to challenge the status quo retreat process, and consider the possibility of retreat not being destructive, but generative. Retreat can instead be an opportunity for reconciliation, stewardship, cooperation, and community building.

How can gardening and long-term community …

Without Traditional Craftsmanship, Modern Design Is Nothing, Muhammad Asif

Masters Theses

This project explores the fusion of traditional wood carving techniques with modern design principles, resulting in a unique Ocean of Design that showcases the beauty of cultural heritage. Inspired by the intricate carvings of my ancestors, who contributed to iconic landmarks like the Omer Hayat palace, I have created a pieces that not only highlights the craftsmanship of my artisans but also reflects my own journey as a designer. The Ocean of Design is influenced by the shapes of leaves and the clean lines of modern aesthetics, blending functionality with artistic expression. Through this project, I aim to promote my …

Numb., Anna Rapson

Masters Theses

Social media platforms, from their conception, posed a break in the lived experience of the average human being’s day to day routines. Although access to information has always been shaped by portals into other lived realities—through photojournalism, print legacy media, news broadcasts both on radio and television—social media has posited a novel phenomenological architecture where borders between embodied reality and perception of lived experience are simultaneously blurred and reinforced. This morphed duality of consciousness positions the body and mind in tension, deconstructing pre-social media conceptions of the ontology of lived experience. In a digital world shaped by limitless input by …

For Now, Eriq Wities

Masters Theses

…For Now follows a body of furniture made as the culmination of four years of intense transition. Through personal narratives, I reflect back on my work, investigating and recognizing the value of impermanence in relation to hand handcrafted heirloom furniture, using beautiful, functional, livable pieces as tools able to register time rather than resist it.

This thesis considers what it means to make heirloom objects for lives that are never fixed. The pieces are meant to be touched, used, altered, and continued. They are finished only for now.