Digital Commons Network^™

Responding To Technological Disruptions During Online Video Interviews Conducted Via Zoom, David R. M. Saavedra

The Qualitative Report

When conducting online video interviews, researchers must be prepared for disruptions with the technology. In this essay I present reflections on my own decision-making processes during technological disruptions while conducting over 36 hours of online video interviews using the videoconferencing software, Zoom. I argue that researchers must consider the severity and frequency of technological disruptions, their research design and goals, and what is happening at the moment a disruption occurs in order to make the best decision possible for how to proceed while still maintaining the integrity of the data generation process.

Reflective Practice Through Dialogic Interactions: Togetherness And Belonging Within A Collective Of Efl Teachers In Mexico, Patricia Marie Anne Houde

The Qualitative Report

This study tackles the lack of collective models to analyze teaching practices by employing a bottom-up and collaborative approach for engaging in Reflective Practice (RP) for English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers in a Mexican context. The Collective Accompaniment Model (CAM; Guillemette, 2014) served to develop reflection with peers at the same hierarchical level, allowing for reflection to evolve over time. The research question was “What are the contributions of other colleagues’ interactions to support reflective practice via collective accompaniment with EFL teachers in Mexico”? The methodology employed during the inquiry was action research (AR) with nine EFL teachers …

The Color Of Stress, Jiemin Park

Masters Theses

This thesis examines the physical and emotional process by which stress in glass can be visualized through color by using a polarization effect.

A conceptual account of three different projects using this process of discovering and revealing the colors of stress hidden within clear glass will be addressed. The mainstays that catalyze the visual metaphor of extreme stress and beauty are; the making process, evidence of the making process and the polarization effect. These two contradictory concepts of beauty and stress are central to this thesis.

Re-Order The Order Of Thing, Yingxi Sabrina Ji

Masters Theses

Humanocentrism positions humans as the measure of all things; what we know as the ‘real’ or ‘true’ is perceived through this limited perspective. As a designer, I challenge the hierarchy, actively moving away from the notion that inanimate objects are subjugated matter.

In this body of work, I turn to actions of world-building to create immersive experiences where ‘objects’ become ‘subjects.’ They are rescaled and re-centered — called into prominence to become protagonists on the cultural and environmental stage. Through generating, collaging, and juxtaposing recycled facts, imagery and organic materials using digital filters, I insert absurdity as a breakpoint to …

Slow Ruptures; Slow Formations, Asta Thrastardottir

Masters Theses

Language shapes our understanding of identity, place, and self. As a graphic designer, I question the existing structures of language, while using it as a material to build new formations. Nudging against certainties, I challenge how the stories we are told can dispossess us, even flatten us.

My method is a constant attempt to peel back the layers and study what lingers below. When questions arise, I look to the ways in which visual artists and writers have seen through this surface. I observe, listen, and hold stories closely, passing them back and forth between my hands. Using annotation and …

Notes To Myself, Anna Dawson

Masters Theses

Immersed in the sun’s light, my body feels saturated, during a long day at the beach. When it begins to cool down and the day inverts into night, I watch the sun set on the ocean horizon. Bart Lootsma, the Dutch architectural theorist describes this experience of light as an immersion and inversion. Intangible, yet something to look at and something to submerge in.

This thesis is a personal journey, and an open exploration of the aesthetic and experience of furniture objects in everyday living. It is a collection of thought processes, observations, and speculations. Sometimes it’s just a note …

Capture, Control, Circulate : Can We Queer Regulatory Power In Graphic Design?, Adie Fein

Masters Theses

Capture, Control, Circulate addresses regulatory power, the transmission and enforcement of culturally-sanctioned behaviors and identity. How does regulatory power operate in graphic design and what—if anything—can the graphic designer do to subvert that operation? The methodologies for subversion explored in this book typically draw from queer and trans* experience and thought. Therefore, the work herein takes up issues of identity, normativity, marginalization, and community.

This thesis also considers design education, and its contemporary emphasis on the capture and control of content. It advocates instead for an educational model that centers circulation; that is, graphic design’s capacity to platform, to publish, …

A Wavering Line, Ginger Gordon

Masters Theses

Someone once told me it only takes a difference of ten degrees in temperature to change the entire course of the day.

I work with objects in collaboration with space, focusing on the intangible meeting point between visibility and invisibility.

Propelled by coincidence and temporal shifts, the transitory, the fragmented, and the found are all welcome, as are the methodologies of the Surrealists and Cubists. Born from a combination of fortuity and planning, curated fragment collages coalesce to represent acts of chance in three dimensions. Balanced forms weave and sway as small portholes direct a view. Form follows chance.

Alien Encyclopedia, Zengqi Guo

Masters Theses

Alien Encyclopedia is a body of work that analyzes, expands, redefines, and leverages the definition of “alien” as both problematic and an avenue of possibility. By mapping the word “alien” as a fragmented play of alternatives, I translate the lessons derived from this exploration into a maker’s lexicon. I use “alien” to frame my identity, as a prompt to ground my projects, a factor to interrupt existing typography and to spark questions, a generative tool to explore the interpolation between the familiar and unfamiliar, and to incite new solutions and actions to solve the problems we are facing now. Alien …

Miles And Miles And Miles, Shannon Rose Jones

Masters Theses

miles and miles and miles is a body of work that draws design inspiration from the Driftless Area of Wisconsin, a region unflattened by ice during the last ice age. The works are site specific extrapolations that have been abstracted in order to trigger a process of memory recollection in the viewer. Selections of atmospheric prose, furniture objects, illustrations, and imagery are presented as snapshots of a place in an attempt to memorialize and make tangible ephemeral memories collected by the maker traveling in this vast landscape. Attention is given to the distillation of form in order to contemplate its …

Disinheritance As Critique: The Paintings Of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Sabo Kpade

Masters Theses

Artistic influence can either be overbearing or liberating for the impressionable artist who is determined to arrive at an individualized artistic identity. One key strategy deployed by the artist is disinheritance as a means by which identity and meaning are created. In her paintings and etchings, British-Ghanaian painter Lynette Yiadom-Boakye has demonstrated several modalities of disinheritance by which she has arrived at a distinct approach to portraiture. Broadly, they come under two categories of major and minor disinheritance, each of which is conditioned by a variety of factors that range from aesthetic to philosophical, personal to political. They signify points …

Revisionist Zinealog : A Coacted Countercultural Device, Madaleine Ackerman

Masters Theses

The REVISIONIST ZINEALOG functions as an evaluation and resourced countercultural device. Here, the user accesses a zinealog, (part zine, part catalog) and its supplemental Animate Postcard to become more familiar with how the canon of precedent positions its political relationship to a representational agenda.

This project is a critique and revision of the politics of aesthetics on the canon of precedent through the act of redrawing futures of the nonsite architectural imaginary.

Space In Sound, Gidiony Rocha Alves

Masters Theses

Due to its strategic location between Africa and the Americas, Cabo Verde became a major hub for the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade where millions of slaves were transported across the Atlantic. The interaction of slaves and merchants saw a racial emergence that gave rise to a mixed culture rich in both European and African traditions. Towards the end of the 1800s, Drought, plagues, poverty and poor colonial rule resulted in forced migrations Westward which still affects the archipelago today. There are more Cape Verdeans living abroad than there are living in the islands. Immigrants in turn have had a major influence …

For A Moment, I Was Lost ; A Visual Reflection On The Process Of Grief And Mortality Within The Home, Adam Chiang-Harris

Masters Theses

Grief is typically experienced following a loved one’s unexpected death. It is human nature to experience grief or bereavement as a way of processing the end of a person's life and coping mechanism of the living. In cases where we have pre-knowledge of a person's inevitable departure due to illness, such as with terminal illnesses like Alzheimers, grief happens in a longer period preceding death. In this circumstance, caregivers, friends, and family, must endure a duration of hardship dictated by the progression of the disease while knowing the fated outcome of a person's life. Typically this period caused by the …

Notes On Institutional Architecture ; Towards And Understanding Of Erasure And Conversation, Liam Burke

Masters Theses

Material Conversations /məˈtirēəl/ /ˌkänvərˈsāSH(ə)ns/ noun 1. derived from an early memory of forming relationships to objects, a way to understand the physical environment through a scaling down process that follows, but is not limited to, space, element, material. 2. the way in which material components are tectonically related 3. a process which would inform one to work with materials in a way which is conceptually informed by both aforementioned definitions 4. an integral aspect of architectural design, Material Conversations enable the architect to establish a language with which to relate to the components of their work, to better speak to …

Community Conservation & Engagement Through The Architecture Of Public Transportation, Liam Costello

Masters Theses

A good public transportation system......should be extensive, quick, and efficient, while also being equitable and accessible as well as environmentally friendly and resilient to cope with climate change and rising sea levels. Until the 1980s, Philadelphia had an extensive streetcar network. From 1977 until 1992, however, all lines serving northern Philadelphia were abandoned, leaving the city’s once-expansive public transit system a shell of its former self. The communities formerly served by streetcar have the lowest average household income in the city and are mainly communities of color. Additionally, many of these residents do not own cars. Therefore, the people who …

Remnants, Sarah Chriss

Masters Theses

Remnants is a revision of our interaction with land extraction through reimagining processes of representation and image-making. By altering perspective and focus, the visual effects of commodity culture shift toward the consequences that occur before and after our consumption. Dependably lost in translation, spatial and temporal information of material exchanges across the globe uphold and preserve the synergy of our commodity transactions. In a field constantly playing with and pushing against the boundaries of representation, remnants aim to redraw lost connections of material transformations through a granite quarry in Rhode Island. Representation is a tool to revise visual narratives that …

Caregivers As Worldbuilders, Caitlin Dippo

Masters Theses

Caregivers as Worldbuilders explores architecture as the relationship between people and the space that surrounds them, looking to memorials, quilts, and forms of gathering to understand how communities use care to shape their built environment. A table was built to host gatherings over the course of the spring semester. Each week new prompts, props, and prosthetics transform the table to meet the needs of those who gather. With the table as a proxy, this thesis considers the in-between spaces that relate and separate us and speculates on how architects can work with communities to gain trust, listen to what is …

Moving Through Time, Anca Gherghiceanu

Masters Theses

Post-communism life in Romania is a duality: people fleeting the country in search of a better life and the simultaneous shrinking cities due to this migration. The built fabric of the city holds distorted nostalgia for those who have left and the burning reality that surrounds the ones that remain. It results in popular villages and cities starting to be abandoned at a massive rate. The migrant story in search of a new life cultivates a journey of loneliness, sacrifice, and sorrow.This thesis will shine light on the physiological effects of mass migration in Romania through satirical editing and storytelling, …

Food For An Island : On The Relationships Between Agriculture, Architecture And Land, Melinda Groenewegen

Masters Theses

Hawai‘i is in a food crisis relying on 85-90% of food to be imported to the islands while 41% of its agricultural lands are unfarmed. My thesis focuses on O‘ahu's broken food system and restoring the community’s identity and relationship to their food and land. On an urban scale, the project maps out the agricultural lands of O‘ahu that are being underutilized and owned by large corporations. Then, the project zooms into a town as an example of how to reinterpret the land. The chosen site was a sugar plantation and is still currently owned by Castle and Cooke. Next, …

Immortal/ Ephemeral/ Versatile, Zhenhong (Brad) Lei

Masters Theses

Imagine 150-year-old building components coming together to form a summertime fruit market. The building is ephemeral, but the parts are here to stay, as well as the building/unbuilding cycle. The immortal ephemerality paradigm embraces the precarious lifespans of buildings and urban environments, alongside the infinite craving for new buildings and urban renewals.

Immaterial Realities, Tyler Lovejoy

Masters Theses

Architects primarily work at a digital desktop, alienated from the spatial byproducts of their collaborative work. Therefore, software is the most influential mediator between these immaterial laborers and projects. Despite architectural production methods evolving, much of the same pernicious labor relations have subsisted. Building Information Modeling has become synonymous with architectural work, yet presents a missed opportunity in addressing and re-imagining labor conditions and power relations between workers.

Today, architects are proposing improved labor structures utilizing cooperatives and unions. Alongside these endeavors, might we reimagine our digital tools as allies? Delivered as a visual essay that is both critical and …

System As A Living Organism, Xinyi Liu

Masters Theses

This is cross-disciplinary research in urban systems, architecture, bio-systems, agriculture, energy supplies, circular economy, and sustainability.

Unnoticeable City Corners, Yuchen Liu

Masters Theses

Walking on the city streets every day, how many times have you noticed the corners between buildings? Do you feel comfortable stopping over that squeezed space? As the urban population increases, the cities seek either outward expansion or vertical development. The taller and denser skyscrapers that emerge from the city gives rise to the small corners which are seemingly useless. Besides, cities growth is problematic because the elimination of the feeling of belonging may harm individuals mental health.

The corner is an intimate space, it is a space for everyone in the city. It could be a bookstore, tea house, …

Scaffolding: Medium, Mediator, Mediated, Mono Yingyi Mo

Masters Theses

This thesis investigates, analyzes, and fictionalizes scaffolds, seeing scaffolds as a medium (that which is being neglected and unquestioned), a mediator (that which is actively executing shaping powers), and a to-be-mediated being (that which requires to be reimagined). Scaffolds in this thesis is registered as a polydimensional group of frameworks, tools, and agreements, ranging from scaffolds in the built environment, architectural drawing convention, CAD program interfaces and interaction modalities, and codes and scripts behind the digital programs. Together, these scaffolds simultaneously enable and prescribe architectural design processes. The project aims to make the scaffolds seen, de-familiarized, and rediscovered. The current …

Cycle Of Care: A Study Based On Home-Care Elderly Living In Beijing, China, Wenyue Remi Qiu

Masters Theses

In China, the aging society has accelerated the elderly care industry to grow into three major systems: home-based care, community-based care, and institutional care facility. All these systems receive financial and political government support, yet the later two draw more social awareness. My thesis project investigates the structures of these current systems by focusing on the demographics in Beijing.

Although in recent years the research shows an upward trend in seniors’ acceptance of living in institutional care facilities, the elderly are still more willing to be surrounded by activities and people that whom they are familiar. In order to guarantee …

Flexing Boundaries : Tectonic Strategies For The Multi-Generational Home, Elise Young

Masters Theses

In the near future, a large percentage of the human population will have to relocate due to an ever changing climate. This will create both short-term and long-term housing needs. To support this shift, our cities will be forced to modify their current use of spaces so that they may accommodate an increasing population and their ever-changing needs. So, is there a way to design homes specifically to make increased population density not only bearable, but enjoyable? This project seeks to design non-load bearing modules that provide both partitions and furniture. The modules should be easy to manipulate so occupants …

Framing: Embracing Trauma In Your "Surrounding World", Zheng Xu

Masters Theses

Have you ever stayed alone and immersed yourself in memories? Have any fragments made you uncomfortable? It was a nightmare. Guilt, self-accusation, inability, exhaustion, and escape took my body and mind. They grew from my traumatic experience. They taunted me and tried to drag me into the abyss of the infinite past when I was stressed out and lost control of the external environment. The shadow struck me until my defense and control system collapsed. The scenes of loss, neglect and pressure became the violence to my psyche.

Unoptimistically, trauma always exists because of natural disasters, bereavements, cutthroat competitions, economic …

Time Enough At Last, Scott Lerner

Masters Theses

As an art history buff and sci-fi aficionado, I’m constantly thinking about the stories told of human progress, or lack thereof. Have modern humans surpassed their ancient ancestors or have they only managed to create more technologically advanced ways of carrying on with their same base drives for power, status, and violence? If we turn to popular media, this question becomes particularly intriguing. Our visions of the future are often just a confused jumble of the past; we reanimate old ideas and images when trying to imagine the things to come. An example of this can be found in Star …

Space Of Ambience : Learning The Relationship Between Environment, Emotion, And Behavior, Xueyun Zou

Masters Theses

I feel like I live life as two different people: one at school, and another at home, and I’m constantly trying to figure out why I feel this way. One of my undergraduate instructors said that he feels I am hiding myself in school, which I hadn’t thought about until he said this to me. I am more social in life, but act introverted in school. I don't want to be attentioned in some context but I want to understand the meaning behind it. This project is a design process for mirroring people in spaces. Mirrors are bridges to connect …