Digital Commons Network^™

Dead Space: The Changing Discourse Of Death: How To Design A Contemporary And Enduring Funeral Practice, Xin Wang

Masters Theses

My thesis seeks to design my grandfather’s cemetery to regain a piece of my personal memory. It also seeks to situate this issue in the contemporary context of the pandemic, which helped inspire my topic. I started my thesis in a very turbulent year. I found myself missing family members far away on the other side of the earth.

How are they doing now?

I suddenly missed my Grandfather’s village, which I had only visited once a year prior to the great pandemic. My Grandfather passed away when I was very young. I get along well with my Grandmother, but …

Segments Of Reality: Interface / Space / Movement, Yuan Tao

Masters Theses

The French anthropologist Levi-Strauss holds that the world we perceive is intrinsically one whole. However, the structure of the human mind has something in common which will turn differences in extent into differences in kind. The process we understand the world around us is by dividing reality into categories. The more subdivisions we have the more detailed we understand. And the process will never end.

What about architecture? We also have ways to piece the architecture as a whole for designing purposes or to understand it.

As architects, we try to diagram, find various ways to visualize design methods and …

Water Inspired Places, Jiaqi Zhang

Masters Theses

How to abstractly reconstruct features of "water" in the digital realm and create new way of visual expression through virtual spatial experiences?

Just like painters using brushes, poets using rhymes, musicians using melodies and dancers using body movements, this project tries to explore the possibility of digital tools for designers to develop a new apparatus of art making process.

Choosing WATER as the main subject is based on its ubiquity and neutrality. When we encounter a body of water, we see a manifestation of natural forces, a reflection of ever-changing environments, and a testimony of human intervention. There are lots …

The Bridge / The Stream / The Home: Interactive Social Housing Typology In Wuxi, Weiyi Xia

Masters Theses

Wuxi is a city built on the regional river system. For thousands of years, the city layout developed along with the river channels. The rivers served people’s daily living, farming, and transportation needs. Social life among residents had also developed at the communal and transitional space along the rivers, mainly at the intersections where the bridges were. As Wuxi’s industry and commerce developed rapidly in the 20th century because of the convenient water transportation system, Wuxi’s urban area expanded widely in a short time. However, Wuxi’s overwhelming urban expansion happened too fast and lacked sophisticated urban planning consideration. This decision …

In Service Of _____; An Inclusive Architectural Collage Practice, Blair Ramsey

Masters Theses

This Thesis asks these questions: who do we serve as architects, what does engagement with marginalized communities look like, what tools and methods are used to represent this process and these communities, and overall, how can architects create safe and inclusive space?

Collage is the critical mechanism for how this work is done and how I wish to practice in the future. Collage is used for documentation, representation, communication, and participation. All in the hope of designing a space with and for the queer community. Vital to the work is the idea of sampling from an existing image-based media that …

Ecotourism In Vacationland: Shoreline Development And Economic Inclusion On The Southern Maine Coastline, Quinn Christopher Wilcox

Masters Theses

The tourist economy in Maine, while profitable, has been a catalyst for the removal of local communities on the coast through the privatization of ecosystem services. Inclusive master planning that reconnects Maine’s coastline to its upland areas in the southern beach region will restore a lost local and working class identity. This proposal enables year-round and flexible programming and stewardship of the natural environment, and challenges the current model of commodification of a landscape and its people. Furthermore, celebration of the right of way to ecological systems and development of supporting markets for both the working and playing communities of …

Personal Positioning System, Laura Diez De Baldeon

Masters Theses

Personal Positioning System (PPS) is an exploration of spatial memory in an unstable world. While the GPS gathers many different, shifting data points in order to provide us with an apparently stable representation of our position, a longitude and latitude in the earth’s grid, PPS offers alternative forms of mapping based on a more flexible unit: memory. PPS reverses the directionality of the GPS and returns to the fragmentary; it disperses rather than unifies, offshooting in different directions, overlaying the intimate on corporate territory, chasing the shifting flow of geographical information. It conceives of design as a spatial practice, one …

Open Articulations, Matthew Bejtlich

Masters Theses

Open Articulations invites an exchange between human and environmental worlds through cycles of improvisation, reflection, and rebirth. It is a study of how exchanges emerge, what forms they can take, how they are mediated, and how we can sustain them with each other and with our surroundings. Through our coordinated immersion in landscapes and our spontaneous creation in them through frameworks encouraging play, we channel the spirit of a jazz drummer riffing with his midnight quartet, exchanging rhythms, images, sounds, movements, and textual fragments. A gentle breath, a flickering sensation, a gesture: expressions of a specific time rooted in a …

Refiguring Relations, Daphne Hsu

Masters Theses

Refiguring Relations sets conditions for interdependence and visualizes the affective relationships that people have with one another. Through scripts and participatory experiences, my work explores, challenges, and formulates expressions of collaboration. I extend spaces of overlap between individuals to encourage connection and alliance building, however temporary, slow, or small. In reading experiences, both print and digital, models of circulation and accessibility allow the audience to see and affect each others’ interactions. This thesis assembles methodologies and blueprints for reciprocal engagement, between designer and collaborators, designer and participants, and among participants themselves.

Future As Medium, Georgie Nolan

Masters Theses

FUTURE AS MEDIUM through critical examination develops a working premise for advancing designed visualizations of the future. In an effort to build new models of practice that consciously work towards the future, I undertake a set of delicate negotiations rooted in critical inquiry as well as creative production, all expressed across three temporal contingencies: yesterday, today and tomorrow.

I work the terrain of the past as an assembled archive of speculative worlds created by architects, designers, and artists, and problematize the mediation of futures through a close reading of their world-building tools. I use this archive to make sense of …

Jettisoning The Frame: Strategies For Designing At The Threshold, Will Mianecki

Masters Theses

Jettisoning the Frame: Strategies for Designing at the Threshold explores graphic design’s capacity for facilitating critique and understanding of accelerating systems of technological control and complexity. Working across archives, architectures, and infrastructures, designing at the threshold is an approach that takes the opacity of systems and subjects alike as a starting point from which new possibilities, configurations, and relations emerge. It is a loose methodology predicated on shifting, jettisoning, and reorienting the role and frame of the designer from objectivity to subjectivity. From neutrality to implication. From scientific to messy. From solutionism to something else.

The Relativity Of Value, Lai Xu

Masters Theses

My practice is an inquiry into the fluctuation of value. To deconstruct the simplistic consumer tropes of mundane/luxury, simple/complex, or hidden/obvious, I experiment with speculative forms of hybridization using interactive media platforms to create an alternate temporality. Microscopic moments open the door to design opportunities. Through field observations, image sequences, data, and archives of artifacts, I roll out the simple signifiers of symbolic value to pause attention while also exposing the paradox of our consumptive behaviors.

What Do I See Between 2 To 8 O'Clock, Youtian Duan

Masters Theses

We record our daily life, our daily emotions. But maybe we lie to ourselves. Or our expression is a kind of hope: what we want to look like or want others to think we are like. Unfortunately, it’s usually not our natural appearance, not the honest thoughts in our hearts. Maybe we don’t understand ourselves.

I like to record my dreams. In the dream world, sometimes I relax, sometimes nervous, and unconsciously wander around. That is the real me. In my unconscious dream state, I identify myself, know myself, again and again. I can live in peace with a world …

Reconstructing Property, Borders, And Sites: Nestling The Built, Christina Truwit

Masters Theses

The built environment is built for resilience. It is curated to have prominence over natural systems, formulated to withstand, and rebuilt to withstand, once ruined. The power of the biosphere is subverted, however, building to protect against nature undermines opportunities within natural systems to protect us.

My thesis is focusing on the problems at play with property and our pressing climate issues. I will be looking at what opportunities exist to deprioritize owned property, to allow for a dispersal of stewardship, and acknowledgment of natural systems.

Becoming A Precipice: The Liminality Of Queer Cruising, Chance Deville

Masters Theses

In “Becoming a Precipice,” I am analyzing queer cruising areas as psychological landscapes from a queer, non-binary perspective, counter to heteronormative conventions. These landscapes are important to me, as being a full participant in this culture is my main form of sexual interaction. My inquiry is prompted by the need to interpret how this specific form of desire molds itself into visceral responses and manifestations of performative masculinity. Entering the cruising landscape itself increases awareness and intensifies the senses, in a space where signals become critical in determining transactions with other individuals beyond spoken language. These somatic reactions are uniquely …

Community, Harana & Karaoke: Towards A Theatrical Design, Ryan Diaz

Masters Theses

Community, Harana, & Karaoke: Towards a Theatrical Design explores graphic design’s potential as theatrical staging for building community and practicing the difficult and complicated art of loving others through performance.

Studying graphic design as harana, the traditional Filipino custom of romantic serenade, offers a framework to view both mediums as social architectures that propose and transform proximities of relation between people. As in harana, graphic design facilitates in naming, grounding, and organizing social relationships; in taking these affective environments as content and form, both arts align with the nature of performance and staging. Through practice, research, and abstraction, the graphic …

Wounds Need Air, Camilla Jerome

Masters Theses

A personal essay in the first-person voice describes the artist’s lived experience navigating the American medical industrial complex with multiple misdiagnosed chronic pain disorders. The artist’s personal story spans thirty years and is contextualized by illness, gender, race, age, ability, class, and is grounded in the artistic expression of self. Descriptions of mental illness, physical disability, and access to proper healthcare are weaved into an examination of embodied knowledge.

Making Meaning, Eric Loucks

Masters Theses

Making Meaning explores mental health through the lens of a contemporary craft-based design practice. Themes of identity, catharsis, connection, flow, teaching, and community create a framework for understanding the role craft plays in developing and maintaining a healthy mindset. The physical pieces that result from this approach are meticulously made, highly considered, and given the quality of contemporary heirloom: a piece that promotes a kind of emotional connection and wellness in their owner.

Imaging "Interracial": Performing Racialized Desire In "Interracial" Heterosexual Hardcore Pornography, Megan Christiansen

Masters Theses

“Interracial” is a term that implicitly categorizes sex between Black cis men and white cis women within contemporary hardcore pornographic video. The artistic and research practice described in this paper is located in, influenced, and driven by pornography itself as an important entry point for thinking about racialized desire.

Looking with care and criticality at the pornographic representation of sex between Black men and white women can allow us to think about how issues of gender and race are key in constructing notions of desire and taboo in America. Through this work I begin to consider how racism and misogyny …

Transformers: Versatile Apparel For A Sustainable World, Zihan Amy Peng

Masters Theses

This collection and book were inspired by a TED talk called “I broke up with fast fashion and you should too” by founder of The UpCycle Project Gabriella Smith. After I heard this inspiring talk, I reflected a lot on my own habits of clothes shopping during different life stages, how I became a fan of fast fashion, and how Covid-19 has impacted the way I shop and dress. I soon dug further into the ugly truth about the fast fashion industry’s environmental impacts, how their marketing strategies lure the general public to consume more products, and potential solutions to …

Out Of Bounds, Luciana Iwamoto

Masters Theses

Humans have an inescapable desire for rationality, structure, and order. We seek efficiency and certainty in our individual and communal lives. We have been encouraged to believe that most things are under our control until something strikes us and brings to consciousness the limits of our knowledge. It’s usually nature’s wild power that overwhelms our faculty of reason and reminds us of our limits. Philosophers called this sensation of overwhelm in the face of nature the sublime experience. In modern cities, surrounded by skyscrapers, we are reminded of our own technological achievements, while nature feels disconnected and distant. Yet, if …

Textile Architecture, Zoe Yates

Masters Theses

The escalating climate crisis has exposed many cracks in conventional building systems. Modern architectural processes contribute to climate change by consuming high levels of energy throughout the building cycle—from sourcing materials to construction to energy use once buildings are in use. Conventional architecture’s emphasis on heaviness and permanence makes these problems unavoidable. Light, temporary architecture is a solution to both the environmental impacts of the practice (the cause) and to the challenges of living in ever more impermanent situations (the effect). As climate change continues to manifest in rising global temperatures, sea level rise, drought, unpredictable weather, and natural disasters, …

Loneliness / Togetherness : Interiority And Connection Under Isolation, Huaqin Chen

Masters Theses

Inhabitants’ perceptions can be greatly impacted when they are in an enforced space, a state of incarceration. That sense of confinement can cause mental or physical health issues on account of the loneliness, lack of interaction or confusion of time and space. Living through enforcement and isolation deeply affect human cognition and behavior. We can also easily find precedents of living through enforcement in the plots of films. By studying narrative, this thesis reconstructs domestic space by investigating the changes in our daily life after our current pandemic. A spatial sequence is created according to the relationwship among time, space …

Ascents And Descents In The 21st Century: Restoring Chand Baori, Japneet Pahwa

Masters Theses

Water is a basic human right and a resource that should be accessible to all. The largest and deepest stepwell in the world, Chand Baori in dry Abhaneri, Rajasthan, is visited by many but serves its purpose for none. This hundred foot deep subterranean structure once allowed access to fresh water during hot and dry seasons, and served as a cool sanctuary for pilgrims, caravans and villagers.Unfortunately, due to climate change and political discourse, the underprivileged, rural population of modern India often does not have access to water. Stepwells were built in India in the 3rd century CE, in the …

Woven Healing: Reimagining The Rural Health Center, Mahasweta Jayachandran

Masters Theses

Seventy-five percent of India’s population is rural. Of those rural citizens, almost nine out of ten lack access to adequate health facilities. While the existing composition of any village in India is housing, temple, and agriculture, the physical well-being of residents has no home. When the local government builds a new isolated healthcare center, these disconnected centers become deserted and a place of unhealthy activity.

How do you effectively embed a new spatial intervention within an existing system of the village that supports health, rather than extending the boundaries of the village into sprawl? Historical study of medical practice in …

Migrating Architecture: Vernacular Futurism, Yichu Jiang

Masters Theses

The history of mankind is migration: while large migrations describe groups and communities, each individual has a unique life history of migration. When moving to a new place, singly or in groups, migrants need self-identification support to adapt to a new environment. As the built environment continuously interacts with human’s everyday life, architecture provides a stable environment, which helps to build individual perceptions in space and social relations. Therefore, architecture migrates with its population and evolves according to context.

Tulou, as a result of historical turbulence and massive migration in China, exemplifies such a phenomenon of migrating architecture. The prototypical …

The Second Home: Breaking The Cycle Of Lonely Death, Woohee Kim

Masters Theses

Lonely Death Syndrome is a phenomenon in which an isolated person suffers a lack of social relationships and dies alone. This is a serious problem in modern South Korea, particularly among poor elderly people living in Seoul. Though the government has tried to help, there is an obvious bureaucratic limit in resolving the sense of loneliness. In Seoul, Nowon-gu is one of the districts that has the highest concentration of poor seniors, and high-rise rental housing built for this population. These apartments are uniform in design in order to house as many people as possible economically in a limited space, …

Overflowing Boundaries: Competition And Mutualism In Urban Villages, Chen Zhang

Masters Theses

Villages besieged by urban sprawl have been isolated and forgotten, broken from urban texture and social relationships. However, this kind of encirclement has no clear boundary and is entirely permeable. Infiltration and overflowing occur on various scales. On the urban scale, the old villages gradually abandoned the agricultural lifestyle and connected with the new industrial city. On the architectural scale, urban villages attempt to integrate with cities by imitating the urban façade wherever they come into contact along the fluid boundary. Some warehouses, small plants, and small workshops have appeared in urban villages. On the human scale, people's lives overflow …

Algal Alterity : A Study Of Florida's Algae-Crisis-Culture, Katelyn Flood

Masters Theses

This research critically engages with the ecology of media discourse surrounding Florida’s “harmful algae crisis” . It uses a content analysis of online news media articles to address how the presence and unique processes of aquatic algae organisms are entangled with people and cultural practices. Specifically, this work grapples with the dynamic relationship between algae organisms and the cultural production of meaning through visual imagery/stimuli. It examines both visual and textual representations of algae in mass media communications covering the harmful algae crisis or “red tide crisis” of 2017 and 2018: an extreme period of aquatic algae proliferation and hazardous …

Inside Out: Rethinking Contemporary Chinese Art And Global Creative Economy, Tiange Li

Masters Theses

This thesis is to destabilize the Western dominant understanding of contemporary Chinese art when it circulates on the global art market, such as the all-to-common narratives only celebrating Chinese artists who are politically criticizing or resist the Chinese authority. Meanwhile, I also question the authority control inside of China, especially the mainstream criteria of aesthetics and art. Cultural anthropologist Aihwa Ong observes that some Western scholars believe contemporary Chinese art to be “crass opportunism with reduced aesthetic value.”Chinese American artist and art critic Chen Danqing criticizes contemporary Chinese art from the last ten years as too utilitarian: “During the Cultural …