Digital Commons Network^™

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

All The Hours Of Light, Isabel Horgan

Masters Theses

My wisdom teeth were extracted in November 2025. I put it off for 5 years. In 2019, my first wisdom tooth emerged as a blood blister. It grew through a vein. I attempted to pop the blister, but instead pulled on the vein, which was so viscerally disturbing that I almost fainted. Every night that followed, I stood at the mirror over the bathroom sink and poked at it. Eventually, enough of the tooth showed that I needed to scrape stuff out of the crevices. It resulted in about a year of having a hole in my mouth that I …

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.

Reading Exercise (You Are The Hero): Dedicated To The Providence River Under The Mall, 02.17.2026, Deborah Fischer

Masters Theses

This play uses the performative potential of guilt, forgiveness, and self-help techniques as a catalyst for a new dynamic, one in which the pursuit of a false narrative, along with the structures it generates, becomes more real than reality itself. It employs “bad acting” and the practice of cold reading to stage a series of acts that function as an entry point into one’s own psyche, leveraging the peripheral space around familiar actions to allow chance, free will, and the experience of “real time” to temporarily come into effect. PLAYER 1: The bad actor is the most utopian one. CLOWN: …

Mirth, Lauren Schell Farias

Masters Theses

In an era defined by unease, uncertainty, paranoia, distrust, and literal, limitless, and constant surveillance, the human condition has been sliced in half, scraped out, and plopped down to rot under a microscope and then sold skincare because we can see it’s crow’s feet. It’s not a pretty picture. If we zoom in a little and look at the minutiae…it’s even worse. But! If we zoom out a little bit after we zoomed in and try to get the focus right, it’s possible to distinguish the little squiggly shapes of joy.

If you can’t quite make that out, you might …

Edge Of Shade, Zhengguang (Lancelot) Li

Masters Theses

Shadow is usually treated as a by-product of architecture. In public space, however, it quietly shapes comfort, orientation, movement, and the willingness to pause or stay. This thesis asks how shadow can become a spatial material that is designed, assembled, and occupied.

Drawing from East Asian architectural and garden traditions, the project studies shade as a condition between exposure and protection. Field research in Providence serves as a testing ground, where three sites represent typical urban gap conditions: a linear passage, an open civic ground, and a neighborhood lot. These sites reveal how existing shadows, circulation, and public use are …

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 …

A Charging Station As Part Of The Island's Energy Metabolism, Kaya Lee

Masters Theses

In an age of energy scarcity, Jeju Island faces an opposite condition. It produces more renewable electricity than it can absorb during the day. This thesis explores how architecture can respond to that surplus.

As Jeju moves toward its Carbon Free Island vision, electric vehicles become more than transportation. They act as mobile batteries, absorbing electricity by day and returning it at night. Through this rhythm, the charging station becomes part of the island’s energy metabolism.

The project reimagines the EV charging station as living infrastructure. It is not only a technical device, but a place of rest, food, and …

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, …

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 …

Latinx Immigrant Parents’ Adjustment To Their Children’S Health And Educational Services For Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, Eliana Cristina Gassette

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

No abstract provided.

Secondary Teachers' Perspectives About The Difficulties Of Transitioning From Traditional To Student-Centered Teaching Approaches, Jo Ann Delgado-Garcia

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

No abstract provided.

A Psycho-Spiritual Transformation In Covid-19 Crisis Narratives: A Comparative Study In Indonesia And Pakistan, Heru Prakosa, Nurlaela Widyarini, Johanes Seno Aditya Utama, Juan Carlos

Makara Human Behavior Studies in Asia

Although the COVID-19 pandemic ended as a global health emergency, its psychosocial legacy persists in many communities. This study examines how religion and spirituality support recovery in Indonesia and Pakistan by shaping crisis narratives. Faith-based language is treated as psychosocial data and interpreted through its functions in meaning-making, emotion regulation, social connection, value anchoring, and action commitment using Psycho-Spiritual Transformation (PST) as a guiding framework. Open-ended responses were collected from 274 participants via an online survey in July 2021 (Indonesia n = 236; Pakistan n = 38). Across both contexts, narratives typically moved from pressure and inner conflict toward spiritual …

Finding The Estuary, Rhea Hu

Masters Theses

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Menstrual Muses: Art, Storytelling, And The Care-Based Communication Of Menstrual Justice, Burcu Koleli

Masters Theses

Menstrual Muses is an artistic research project comprising a written thesis and a body of work developed across soft sculpture, ceramics, illustration, graphic memoir, digital media, and participatory workshops. The written component operates alongside the studio practice, outlining the project’s theoretical framework, methodology, and context while engaging questions of communication, accessibility, embodiment, and stigma. It situates menstruation within feminist discourse, examining how it has been culturally silenced, regulated, and shaped through systems of power.

The artistic work functions as research materialized through practice, responding to the central question of how my art can facilitate conversations around menstrual justice. It explores …

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 …

Waterway: A Steam-Based Therapeutic Device System, Mingyuan Dong

Masters Theses

Across history and global cultures, water has played a central and often spiritual role in practices of care, from cleansing rituals to saunas and steam therapies. Yet, within contemporary product design, water is typically treated as a utility rather than as an experiential material capable of shaping perception, attention, and well-being. This thesis, Waterway, investigates how water, specifically in its steam state, can be designed as both a therapeutic medium and a ritualized experience that engages the body and mind.

Waterway proposes a steam-based wellness system that addresses physical pain and somatic discomfort while cultivating slower, more attentive interaction. Rather …