Digital Commons Network^™

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, …

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.

Exploring Clinical Ladder Program Participation Among Operating Room Nurses, Camille Sistoso-Lorenzana

Doctoral Projects

Continuous professional development among nurses is vital, yet not all nurses embark on this career journey. The Clinical Ladder Program (CLP) is a retention strategy among various health institutions to retain talent and improve nurses' satisfaction, but this plan is unappealing or indifferent to some nurses. While the CLP is a motivation tool for nurses to focus on clinical expertise in bedside care (Riley et al., 2009), and resources are available to increase a nurse's chances of successfully advancing the ladder, participation in and perspectives on the CLP remain unknown, especially among operating room nurses. This project is guided by …

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 …

The Root Over My Eyes, Shiyeon Monk

Masters Theses

What does it mean to have a body? To touch, to breathe, to taste, and perceive all the things that make up a person, how does it feel to recognize the physical bounds your mind is enclosed in? To me—a woman, a bisexual woman, a biracial bisexual woman, an immigrant biracial bisexual woman, a Black and East Asian immigrant biracial bisexual woman—each of these markers feels heavy with its own context of history, location, and interpretation. Too many times have I wondered what it is like to be within a body accepted as a midpoint.

I make work out of …

Sous-Bois, Spencer G. Peterson

Masters Theses

This thesis explores furniture as a dynamic site of belief production.  Compressed theatrical ecosystems where image, object, and body collapse into one another.  These objects will not offer clarity and they will not restore order.

But they also mask nothing.

Compress, layer, stage, repeat.

Oscillate between seen, felt, and believed.

Situational 情境中, Jo Zixuan

Masters Theses

The Chinese title of this book 情境中 (qíng jìng zhōng) translates directly to within the situation. Yet separately as three individual characters, qíng jìng zhōng means emotion, scene, within. A situation in my language is inherently an emotional scene, which requires us to account for more than the objective conditions, such as the geographical, economic, and social circumstances, as well as the subjective and affective experiences of individuals.

How can design analyze the context of given situations and construct new situations? The key terms organizing this book describe a movement. Site establishes the levels of context in which any …

Mediated Landscapes, Image Road Trip, Faith Kim

Masters Theses

I do whatever I can to not work on my laptop. But when I do, I'm greeted with the pristine landscape of Mac OS Tahoe — it was Mac OS Sequoia for a long time until recently. These default wallpapers are engineered layers composing an image: mediated, highly designed, presented as though they were simply found. Where an image lives determines what it means.

From the digital camera to the phone camera, effortless distribution, infinite storage: photography has reshaped not just how we make images but what we think they're for. I'm as interested in moving existing images around as …

The Disappearing Shore, Marguerite Kreuzkamp

Masters Theses

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In The Becoming, Lingyi Hu

Masters Theses

What is molten glass when it is not asked to become a functional object?

What can glass become when it is breathing and moving on its own will?

What does it feel like to be alive at 1650°F?

Glass, in its molten state, exists in continuous flux, neither stable nor with a fixed boundary. It resists direct apprehension. In this thesis, I approach glass as a material whose vitality emerges through motion, reaction, and change. Glass thinks, remembers, and carries time within its movement. Actions taken in the molten state—interruptions, reactivations, and pauses—are not preserved as gestures, but translated into …

Meadowkeepers, Molly Lefanowicz

Masters Theses

New England’s cities cover the lowlands where meadows once dotted the landscape. These meadows were among the first spaces lost to development— hidden today beneath layers of concrete foundations, asphalt roads, and diligently mowed turfgrass lawns. Meadows are critical ecosystems: they support pollinators, act as seed banks for local plants, filter rainwater, sequester carbon, and build soil. But their steady disappearance is more than an ecological loss. As stewards and inhabitants of meadows, people hold a longtime cultural connection to their presence. Meadowkeepers is an effort to renew that connection.

Meadowkeepers introduces a community-scale model for meadow reestablishment in urban …

Margin:Finding Coexistence Within The Marginalized Habitats Of Cities, Zihan Sun

Masters Theses

Marginal spaces can be found throughout cities, yet they are often ignored and overlooked. Despite this, these areas play a crucial role in urban environments due to their unexpected vitality. The overlapping uses of dominant and marginal actors, including humans and non-human species such as pedestrians, pigeons, and plants, create spatial conflicts within these spaces. How can the existing conditions of marginal spaces be subtly reworked to mediate these tensions without erasing marginality?

This thesis investigates three sites in Providence across different scales, using consistent observation and documentation to understand their marginality. Different actors serve as lenses for analyzing and …

Productive Armature, Gabriel Ofem Peter

Masters Theses

What if water was all you had, what if your only source of survival was a body of water? I shudder to think that some people get to be put in this situation in the world we live in. As I understand the importance of water to survival, it is obvious that water can be the only lifeline of survival for a community. This is the experience for residents of Makoko, Lagos. Their survival depends on the Lagos Lagoon, a large body of water flowing in from the Atlantic Ocean. This research looks beyond the surface of what this community …

Floaters, Kyle Gyumin Dong

Masters Theses

The eye is often regarded as the primary sensory organ of the human body, and the ocular system as our most reliable means of perceiving the world.

With vision, we travel across vast distances through telescopes to expand our knowledge of the observable universe and peer into the hidden world of atoms through microscopes. At the same time, we seek divinity from apparitions in the clouds, broaden the range of colors visible under closed eyelids, and catch a brief glimpse of the future in clairvoyant dreams.

My photographic practice oscillates across this spectrum. Between reason and intuition, between the measurable …

Weaving Grounds: Connecting Canyons And Empowering Borderland Communities, Maria D. Lopez Vazquez

Masters Theses

National policies materialize in the United States-Mexico political divide, also known as the borderlands. Willow Canyon is a dissected land form inextricably linked to the Tijuana River watershed, forming with the adjacent landforms on both sides of the border one landscape. The Guadalupe Hidalgo Treaty¹, signed in 1848 by the US and Mexican governments, traced an arbitrary line across these landscapes, disregarding their relationship. The consequences of these actions are visible in the physical deterioration of the landscape and ecology, as the hydrological cycle has been modified. In the 1940’s, the picturesque flow of Willow Canyon was dissected by urbanization, …

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 …

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 …

Staff Education To Emergency Department Professional Nurses, Florence Chukwuneke Chukwuneke

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

No abstract provided.

Real-Time Fraud Detection, Haidi Aly Fahmy, Abdelhadi Nait-Zerrad, Shiva Krishana Reddy Ravuula, Sangwhan Cha

Harrisburg University Other Works

Financial fraud detection is a high-volume, high-velocity analytics problem. Traditional rule-based systems are often easy to deploy, but they are limited by static thresholds, delayed response, high false-positive rates, and weak explainability. This report presents a formalized end-to-end Big Data architecture for real-time fraud and anomaly detection in financial transaction streams.

The proposed architecture ingests transaction events through AWS Kinesis, enriches them through an Apache Flink stream-processing layer, scores them with an XGBoost classifier, explains model outputs using SHAP, and converts structured evidence into human-readable summaries through a controlled GPT explanation layer. Results are persisted through a hybrid storage strategy …

Specific Randomness, Xinyi Li

Masters Theses

Stability is not a default. It must be actively produced.

My work grows out of precarity. Everything around me is a running process, but nothing is guaranteed. This thesis is about how to keep form going under that condition. My argument is that pattern is the key: not as decoration, but as an information system that lets the effort of sustained construction be seen, while keeping its logic from being fully read.

I use computational tools to apply rules to source images. The condition of these source images is that multiple constrained processes are running at once, each following its …

Where Each Step Lands: Reconnecting And Reparenting Through Visual Narrative, Skye Wang

Masters Theses

This research begins with lived experiences of dissociation and a persistent sense of disconnection between body and consciousness. It explores the potential of visual narrative as an embodied practice. Through daily walking and sketching, bodily sensations are translated into visual language through a synesthetic process, forming the foundation for a picture book as the central outcome of this project.

The picture book adopts the perspective of a jumping spider positioned beneath a five-year-old girl’s shoe, creating a shifting, downward-facing viewpoint. The spider functions as a viewing position, while the girl represents the inner child. The narrative is constructed around the …

Open_______, Eitan Boiarsky

Masters Theses

This thesis examines how ambiguity can function as a deliberate design strategy rather than a condition to eliminate. While modern design traditions have prioritized clarity, efficiency, and immediate legibility, this work revisits Umberto Eco's concept of the Open Work and Oskar Hansen's Open Form to argue that openness is not a failure of design but a method within it.

Through a series of workshops and object-based experiments, ambiguity is structured as a design instrument that invites interpretation rather than delivering fixed meaning. Participants encounter unfamiliar forms with deliberately withheld information, producing moments of hesitation, speculation, and reinterpretation. These encounters demonstrate …

Frictional Intelligence, Posheng Cheng

Masters Theses

This is an experimental interaction design project that challenges anthropomorphism in human-computer interaction. In particular, the recent advancement of artificial intelligence technologies like Large Language Models has taken anthropomorphism to new heights. The conversational chatbot interface of AI prioritizes mimicking an inherently human communication medium to maximize human-likeness. However, anthropomorphism has several downsides. Conversational interfaces obscure the limitations and the tangible cost of the technology. They also imply fictional moral status and human-level cognitive capabilities, which means general public sentiment focuses on the ``overhyped'' excitement and fear rather than on other socio-ethical and capacity questions that are far more urgent …

American Paradise, Virginia Hanusik

Masters Theses

The following is a collection of stories and ideas about the making of our physical and emotional worlds, along with their fracturing, deconstruction, and degradation within the American industrial landscape.  It suggests the value of the unknown and the grace of mistakes, emotional and material friction, and the hiccups that come with learning.

For American Paradise, I’m bringing my interest in landscape extraction, and the people and families within them, to my own autobiography. In this work I turn to where I grew up, the people that brought me there, my connection to manual labor, and the use of specific …

Sentience, Sheetal Agrawal

Masters Theses

The increasing urgency for sustainable and adaptive systems has driven research toward embedding intelligence directly into materials rather than relying solely on external sensing and control systems. This thesis explores how smart material1 embedded systems can be designed to recognize and respond to environmental signatures, defined as measurable patterns such as temperature fluctuations and mechanical forces. Central to this investigation is the integration of shape memory alloys, particularly Nitinol, with geometry-based actuation mechanisms that amplify material behavior into functional system responses.

The central argument is that designing with smart materials is a design problem, not primarily a materials science problem …

Open Forms, Barbara Cutlak

Masters Theses

Open Forms

Architecture always exists in relation to the context in which it stands. There is no way, however, to anticipate how the constructed space will be inhabited, or transformed by the surroundings — and so, it remains open to discovery and change. Graphic design form can operate in a similar way: opening itself to a context by offering multiple ways of seeing, interacting and being performed.

Drawing from the contexts that have informed my practice — my training in architecture and the artistic movements of Brazil, my home country — Open Forms experiments with how to translate these spatial …

Between Seeing And Knowing, Pavol Roskovensky

Masters Theses

Abstract

For me, painting often begins with an experience of the world that cannot immediately be explained. As a child in Slovakia during the Velvet Revolution, I saw a flag disappear from the town square and a new one take its place. What changed was color and proportion; but the feeling of the space and my relation to it changed completely. That moment has stayed with me because it revealed something I continue to believe: before language, before explanation, visual form has the power to move us.

In my practice, I approach painting as a site of perception, discovery, and …

Unleashing Material Agencies, Yahui Chen

Masters Theses

Contemporary architectural practice has come to rely on a narrow repertoire of high-energy industrial materials, giving rise to what might be called a material "hegemonic structure" in which certain substances and construction logics dominate at the expense of others. This dominance suppresses material diversity and limits architecture's capacity to align with ecological processes, producing a systemic metabolic imbalance within the built environment. At its root, this imbalance reflects a structural absence: the persistent treatment of architecture as a closed, controllable system that imposes human will upon matter while suppressing its inherent agency.

Engaging with what Jane Bennett terms "vital materialism," …

Embodied River: Deliberate Unbuilding In Post-Dam Landscapes, Travis Kelley

Masters Theses

This thesis explores the possibilities and challenges that legacy hydro-powered dams and mill complexes offer. Through historical and contemporary analysis of New England’s 14,000 dams and of a particular site in Maynard, Massachusetts, the research delves into the factors that make these interventions so challenging. It begins from an assumption rooted in the ethical and environmental imperative to remove or modify legacy dams, which are those built for a purpose that is no longer being utilized, and rejects the existing binary of “remove” vs “preserve,” which is the dominant narrative in the dam removal conversation as it exists in 2026. …