Digital Commons Network^™

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 …

Lace Memory Lab, Xinyu Han

Masters Theses

Lace, originally developed from European religious garments, has long been treated as a decorative and secondary textile craft. With its delicate hand-weaving, intricate patterns, and lightweight quality, lace has been widely used in clothing and furniture, it has always remained at the edge of spatial design. This thesis focuses on lace as a material memory, exploring how its characteristics can be translated into architectural language and integrated into the spatial practice of adaptive reuse of old buildings. When I think of lace, I notice the similar nature of its craftsmanship and spatial concepts.

What happens when lace is no longer …

Providence Puzzle:Exhibition Design As Urban Spatial Practice, Ye Chen

Masters Theses

Providence is a city shaped by past industrial production, immigrant communities, artistic practice, waterfront renewal, and urban redevelopment. Its identity exists not only in historical remnants, but also in the cultural atmosphere created through the ongoing interaction between past and present. Former factories, river infrastructure, neighborhood streets, public parks and scenes of everyday life together form an urban narrative that continues to evolve. Yet existing methods of presenting Providence’s history and culture remain limited to informational signage, commemorative markers, or one-directional communication, offering little incentive for people to stop, read, explore, or actively engage. As a city rich in both …

Fallen Leaves:The Unseen, Forgotten, Presences That Live In Us, Juhee Cho

Masters Theses

The fallen leaf is a material figure of the unseen, forgotten moments that have made us and holds us still while remaining outside our sight. In urban environments, fallen leaves are managed as seasonal waste, collected and quickly separated from everyday encounter. Yet within ecological systems, they continue to participate in cycles of regeneration, becoming the soil that sustains new life. This quiet continuation is unavailable to the eye, yet known by the body. As a proof of this, the leaf’s transformation reveals itself not to the mind, but to the hand. The curling fiber wears out, the deepening brown, …

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 …

Healing In The Flow: Reimagining Public Well-Being Through The Adaptive Reuse Of The Heritage Park Visitor Center, Yaqi Zhang

Masters Theses

This thesis proposes the adaptive reuse of the Heritage Park Visitor Center in Fall River, Massachusetts, as a community oriented environment for rest, care, and social connection along the Taunton River waterfront. Although the park provides public access to nature, the existing building does not support everyday forms of well being such as pause, reflection, quiet recovery, or informal gathering. In many public spaces across New England, wellness remains separated from civic life and is often treated as private, specialized, or secondary.

In response, the project rethinks self care not as a private luxury, but as a shared spatial condition …

Within The Archive: Jewelry And The Poetics Of Historical Trace, Fusheng Zhong

Masters Theses

Jewelry is a poetic translator, through which my intense and complex engagement with history is materialized. By reinterpreting the classical Chinese poem Bring the Wine(Li Bai,752) through paper-based materials, I translate poetry infused with personal traces and a distinct stance into wearable objects that embody the weight of history.

Through jewelry, an art form carried in close proximity to the body, I engage with history by staging acts of document visualization, transforming poems and archival fragments into visual and tactile records.  I suggest that in conditions of informational overload, individuals may gravitate toward reductive positions in order to avoid being …

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 …

Aer, Qiyi Cai

Masters Theses

I began this project from a recurring perception: that simple, everyday elements carry distinct and often unexpected qualities. For me, the number six is green and tastes like grapes; the number two feels deep blue. Even bottled water from different brands seems to possess specific forms of character, some sharp, some rounded, some soft like cotton. I first encountered the word synesthesia in elementary school writing classes, where it was introduced as a literary device frequently used in classical poetry and prose. For instance, a gentle rain might be described as “soft as pastry,” translating a visual phenomenon into tactile …

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 Porous Auto Body, Banshee Maria

Masters Theses

Balances within the human body and auto mechanical structures share a staggering amount in common. The two are intrinsically linked through their shared reliance on intricate internal and external systems to be in balance in order to function. Our biological makeup consists of electrical, fluid and chemical systems which mirror the machines we have chosen to forge. I am plagued by the human need to see ourselves mirrored in metal form, or perhaps we are just unable to create too far outside ourselves, resulting in the leeching of human structures into all technology we construct.

The Old Testament of the …

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 …

چھپن چھپائی (Chupan Chupai), Muhammad Talha Mr

Masters Theses

Baji, how do you breathe in a burqa? Doesn’t it suffocate you? Don't ask too many questions, walk straight, and don’t let go of my hand. Men were standing in the street, and she was trying to avoid them, walking as fast as she could, almost dragging me. I saw a big wedding tent. It was a multi-colored, red, yellow, blue, and green pattern. I asked baji, Is that where we are going? She nodded in affirmation. The tent was beautiful. I saw kids peeking inside the tent, and it reminded me of a time when I was doing the …

Huh? Wow!, Lieyah Dagan

Masters Theses

I view design as a series of gestures: actions through which ideas are processed, refined, and communicated. Barbara Tversky, an American psychologist, describes gesture as a way of thinking through action, where movement becomes part of how understanding is formed (Tversky). In this sense, gesture is not only a means of communication between people, but a way of understanding and responding to the world through action.

My process begins with noticing—observing things in the world and returning to moments that hold a particular quality or possibility. Many of the things that draw my attention carry traces of movement or manipulation: …

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.

Companionship, Certainty, Integrity, Chandler C. Curtis

Masters Theses

being around people who surprise me, realizing how different we all are, broadening my conception of the world and my corner of it; being kind and considerate, giving others grace; being given responsibilities; being honest with and for myself; braiding my hair collecting free things; critique discussions and any setting to diligently read objects; Culton; dancing; doing sudoku or other ‘hackable’ puzzle; doing things that seem impossible, especially for someone else; drying off with a towel that absorbs well, particularly after a cold shower; eating cantaloupe; encouraging others to trust themselves, using my experiences to support someone else's journey; exchanging …

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: …

Household Hegemon: Domestic And Affective Traces Of Us Influence In Mexico In The 1950s And 1990s, Edgar Solórzano

Masters Theses

“Household Hegemon: Domestic and Affective Traces of US Influence in Mexico in the 1950s and 1990s” is a collection of personal essays, historical research, and fictional texts that examine the impact of US-American soft power on Mexican society. This project expands and deepens the research and work developed during my two-year MFA in Sculpture at RISD, evolving material investigations into a comprehensive written and visual record of the 1950s post-WWII boom and the 1990s post-NAFTA transition. These two decades not only represent the most significant in terms of American influence but also the years in which my parents and I …

Countersense, Avrie Allen

Masters Theses

countersense is an engagement with embodied experience, the conditions that shape it, and the sense we make of it. countersense is a counterhegemonic practice of sense-making in graphic design, performed between perception and meaning-making, self and material conditions, and always foregrounding what politics are chosen as a result of the personal.

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 …

Sites Of Departure, Kevin Tomas

Masters Theses

At all scales of human history, there exists a record: The story of how things came to be. An infinity of interconnected traces that thread the intimate and the immense into a single fabric.

Beginning from distinct points of entry, Sites of Departure explores the axes of resolution and scale in documentation, asking what becomes visible when the instruments of the dominant record are set aside. Moving between recovery and confrontation, the work questions the structures that produce our understanding, while creating new documents for future interpretation—all against the reality that to make a claim, is to claim some truth. …

Frameworks, Hailey Lee

Masters Theses

Put on a pair of glasses. What do you see? People? Trees? Cars? Buildings? Now focus on the glasses themselves. Can you see the frame? Why is it that you donʼt notice it until now?

Glasses make the world feel clearer, sharper, more accurate. But what youʼre seeing is always a view inside a frame. The glasses give you a frame, and show you the world through it. Once you get used to that frame, you forget that everything you see is already inside one. Most of us forget that the frame of our glasses is always there—at the edge …

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 …

Seeking Ground, Shrishti Chatterjee

Masters Theses

Design increasingly sits within modern systems that reduce the world to narrow, instrumental categories. A tree is paper, the sky is a clock, an ant is a pest. And a graphic designer is a visual marketer optimising for reach and engagement. This leaves the designer without a sense of their place in the world.

Seeking Ground asks how we might return to a more rooted practice. Physically, the ground is the solid surface on which all other things rest. Conceptually, it is the foundational premise from which knowledge is derived. To be grounded is to be connected to real-world implications …

Optimalism, Clara F. Cayosa

Masters Theses

Optima. Optimal. Optimism. Optimalism.

Optima is a humanist typeface created by designer Hermann Zapf (German, male)

Optimal is what design—and life—in 2026 wants to be: maximum productivity, maximum output. But optimal for whom, and by whose measure?

Optimism is what you find in jeepney decalomania, or sari-sari store signage in the Philippines. It is the joy of everyday making, an assemblage of color and humble material. In Clara Balaguer’s words: of turning shit into gold.

Optimalism is my (Filipino, female) thesis; an accumulation of what I've learned trying to persist in graphic design. This is …

The Second Horizon, Roger Labib

Masters Theses

This thesis examines the obsolescence of heavy industry as a spatial and infrastructural condition through which the contemporary metropolis can be reimagined. In Chicago, the grain, lumber, steel, and meat industries, along with the railways, rivers, and logistical systems that connected them, produced a first horizon: a metropolitan landscape organized by material production, labor, extraction, and the movement of goods. These industries did not only shape the city physically; they generated forms of collective life through their excesses; heat, smoke, water, neighborhoods, union halls, taverns, and labor communities.

Today, a new industrial force is emerging through data infrastructure. Computation, artificial …