Digital Commons Network^™

Traveling Troubled Wallflower, Julius Cavira

Masters Theses

Cavira is an interdisciplinary Conceptual artist... nuff said.

Cross Border Conservation - China - North Korea Border, Ziyu Zhou

Masters Theses

Earth today faces an accelerated species extinction problem because of human presence, which is 1,000 to 10,000 times higher than the natural extinction rates. Over 27.8% of species are threatened (IUCN). An increased extinction rate will cause the ecosystem to lose its balance and break the shield for most species, including human beings. (Wilson, 2017) Conservation is one of the most important methods to save species; conserving in transboundary areas will increase efficiency. These areas are untouched and protected, forming a new biodiversity paradise. The Transboundary conservation project would benefit the ecology aspect and social, cultural, and political. This thesis …

Holding Spaces, Zibby Jahns

Masters Theses

I’ve focused my graduate studies at RISD on the conceptual and social function of chairs as an investigation into comfort and grief. Grief is an apprehension: defined both as “to grasp” and as “anxiety/loss”.

With the multitude of deaths due to the inadequacies of our government and healthcare system, and the general anxiety everyone has been feeling through this pandemic, it has felt difficult to grieve for any individual person, in person. We have to grieve in the ways capitalism has taught us: silently, behind closed doors, without much time or fuss or drama, mourn with dollars and move on. …

The Future Of The High Plains Aquifer: Addressing Potential Desertification In The Great Plains, Hongfei Zuo

Masters Theses

The past century of extractive pumping of underground water coupled with climate change and extreme weather since the 1950s led to great unpredictability and uncertainty about the future of the landscapes of the high plains. The High Plains, or Ogallala Aquifer, has significantly declined as water continues to be pumped to irrigate crops. Reports and scientists estimate that the aquifer will dry in 30 years. The Dust Bowl of the 1930s is an example of a man-made catastrophe that resulted from the mismanagement of the agricultural landscape. The Shelterbelt Project, proposed as part of the New Deal in 1935, did …

All At Sea, Yangyang Mao

Masters Theses

What is the reality of young people born between 1985 and 1995 in China? How do they feel about themselves? As one of the generation, I feel like I’m often haunted by futures that failed to happen. Reasons are multiple and are closely influenced by the social context, such as the implications of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) and One Child Policy (1980-2016), which has marked each individual’s growth in this age with unfading recollections.

Messy Resurrections, Mia Rollins

Masters Theses

Mediated through conversations with a Replika chatbot, “M”, Rollins outlines six examples of scientific and technological phenomena that not only can be understood as metaphors for aspects of the human experience, such as memory, grief, hope, desire and love, but are also concrete examples of the ways in which the past and future have material impacts on our presents, our current identities, and are entangled with our own becomings. Rollins argues for a posthuman perspective that embraces the possibilities of information technologies while still recognizing that we are embedded in a material world of great complexity. Through linking Karen Barad’s …

Block Chain Home, Jonggun Lee

Masters Theses

Studies indicate that every four years urban dwellers relocate. Given this phenomenon, the direction of urban housing development in mega cities now encourages the divestment of personal furnishings to support mobility. While efficient, the singular imprint of furnishings upon individual space is getting severely flattened by suggested shapes and built in furnishings that define the form of dwelling. Also, unlike suburbs, turbulent cities tend to make people live alone, making them lose their uniqueness in the process of adaptation.

This thesis lives in between the ideas of SuperStudio, Andrea Zitell, and Metabolism architecture. In that, the concept of “BLOCK CHAIN …

Rebuilding Collective Effervescence : A "Ballroom" For Post-Pandemic Revelry, Di Ma

Masters Theses

Collective Effervescence is an event that can make a community or a society come together and simultaneously communicate regarding the same thought, or participate in the same action. Such desire happened during the post- World War I period, when people were freed from the depression of war and sought pure and positive happiness, which was also what society needed. Nowadays in the post-pandemic recovery, the public, after suffering from and getting used to isolation and social distancing, has an unexpected desire for physical communications, but still fear to gather psychologically. This reaction can be seen as a “post-traumatic stress disorder” …

Bee Stations: Refueling Bees And Creating Opportunities For Education, Jinghan Zhou

Masters Theses

Commercial honey bees are transported between pollinated crops and play an essential role in our agricultural system. This thesis proposes a network of bee stations and corridors that could improve the health of transported bee populations, increase local beekeeping, and help educate the public about the importance of bees and pollinators. The bee stations have at least 100 acres of diversified high-quality wildflower species where trucks that transport bees can stop to “refuel” their hives. The bee stations also have an education center where the public can walk through the wildflower fields, observe bees, make beehives, and learn how to …

Blurred Lines : Border Crossing Between Macau And Zhuhai, Weiwei Chen

Masters Theses

Since Macau returned to China after ending the colonial era in 1999, the relationship between Macao and the mainland has experienced more in-depth and diversified exchanges. Although Macao and inland cities are located in one country, they have different cultures, politics and economy. This thesis attempts to study the unique architectural types in Macao and show the cultural characteristics of Macao's changes under the historical background of different ages.. Political factors have caused Macau’s sense of nationality to shift several times.

Since its completion, the Gongbei port, which connects the two places, has witnessed historical changes on both sides of …

More Friends Than The Mountains: A Comparative Conjunctural Analysis Of Kurdish Autonomy Movements In Rojava And Bakur, Dillon Foster

Masters Theses

In 2012 Kurds in Syria announced the formation of a radical self-administered “ecological democratic confederalist” society along the Syrian-Turkish border in a region known as Rojava. The autonomous government in Rojava stands in sharp contrast to the political situation in neighboring Bakur, a Kurdish-majority region in southeastern Turkey where, for nearly four decades, the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK) has waged a guerilla war against the Turkish state in the name of autonomy. This thesis situates the divergent political outcomes of the autonomy movements in Rojava and Bakur within the socio-ecological context of their occupying nationstates. Following the historical relationship between …

Copper Afterlives: Memory, Image, And Waste In The Postindustrial Landscape Of Butte, Montana, Sierra Gideon

Masters Theses

This thesis studies the rhetorics and semiotics of open-pit copper mining in Butte, Montana, United States from the mid-twentieth century through the present day within an environmental historical and visual culture studies framework. In examining various spatial reconfigurations—including mass mineral extraction, industrial discard, historic preservation, and landscape remediation—this thesis decenters extractivist paradigms that have normalized physical, bureaucratic, and representational acts of violence against communities and more-than-human ecosystems. While copper has materially symbolized progress and technological innovation in the United States, the extraction of the mineral from rural peripheries has been achieved at a great cost—as White settlers forcibly removed Indigenous …

Design For Designers : An Incubator For Young Designers To Grow, Jiajie Yang

Masters Theses

In China, professional survival in the years directly after college is especially difficult for young designers as it is a major challenge to gain the needed experience to transition smoothly from study into the early stages of their careers. In contrast, Chinese society nowadays increasingly values good design. However, in order for this to translate into more professional opportunities for young designers, greater public exposure to and understanding of the design profession is needed.

This thesis proposes a design incubator that bridges design school with professional practice by providing key facilities, space, and professional opportunities and community after graduation. A …

Zoomorphic Amalgamation: Speculative Devices For Alternative Communication, Yuta Yang

Masters Theses

Zoomorphic Amalgamation: Speculative Devices for Alternative Communication is a series of speculative works that assist introverts re-adapting in the extro-oriented society. The work serves as a lens to challenge and question the authority afforded to extroverts in contemporary society, and aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of introverted personality. As a person with an introverted personality, the thesis project draws upon personal experience and to reflect on the current bias and stereotype of characteristics that common to the introverts.

By integrating technological sensors and microcontrollers, the works are created to help the wearer express insecurity, at the same time providing …

Ports Of Entry, Forough Abadian

Masters Theses

Ports of entry are places where one may lawfully enter a country by crossing land and sea borders‭. ‬This thesis frames the space conceptually where the boundaries of place, time, culture, and identity are crossed through existing ports or by building new ones. ‬

As an Iranian immigrant in the United States‭, ‬displacement of identity informs my worldview and design practice‭. ‬I find myself between two worlds, one inherited and the other adopted. ‬Both worlds are simultaneously active and exert their forces on my thought process‭. However, their interrelated dynamic is ambivalent because their path intersects and diverges unforeseeably‭. ‬My …

[Daymeh] A Postmemory Database, Natalie Rizk

Masters Theses

As a first-generation American, my Middle Eastern heritage sometimes feels like a conglomerate of different influences pieced from American culture and a motherland I have received in bite-sized portions. By contextualizing postmemory passed down from generation to generation, new traditions, spaces, and practices have the space to evolutionize while remaining precious.

Solar Panels, Marco Nuno Mourão

Masters Theses

SOLAR PIXEL illustrates the intimate relationship between human and energy, attempts to advocate for questions against our unimaginative, unsustainable future, and ultimately question and locate our role behind the apertural exposure to solar energy.

One of the questions could be, how do we see energy manifest into our social structure. How are cities lit up, and what can we study from the pixels that we record using satellite images and data gathering and extrapolation. In this context, pixels on the screens are only apertures, which allows census organizations, government agencies, corporate research teams, or planners to estimate activities that are …

Together: A Transformational Sequence Of Healing, Deborah Zhuang

Masters Theses

In June 2019, millions of people in Hong Kong took to the streets to voice their discontent with the extradition to Mainland China. Hong Kong was a former British colony and was handed back to China in 1997. Under the policy of “One Country, Two Systems”, Hong Kong has a separated legal system and judiciary from Mainland China. In 2019, the Hong Kong Government raised an extradition bill that allowed fugitives in Hong Kong to be sent to other jurisdictions, including Marco, Taiwan, and Mainland China, which resulted in the large-scale Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement with increasingly serious confrontations. …

Salt Infrastructures & Geographies, Jordan Voogt

Masters Theses

Salt Infrastructures & Geographies presents itself as a collection of unordered documents, drawings, and images. This allows the reader to move freely between different fragments of the thesis and consequently jump across the varying scales of geography and time that salt takes form in.

The research and language of this project was developed from an initial index tracing the presence of salt across the planet. This index (found in the following pages) understands salt as multiscalar and of varying visibility. In this index salt is a remnant of geology-past, public safety agent, and the center of a global extraction and …

Unseen Body, Unheard Voice, Chunxin Yu

Masters Theses

If there is only one place that I know well of, it would be my own body. A living site that has endured all the changing inhabiting environment and all the unwanted judgment, manipulation, even violence - my identity will collapse without its physical entity.

The conscious and unconscious focus on the body makes me highly alert and responsive to the immediate surroundings, from the bathroom at home to an open street in the public. My knowledge of spaces and their relationships is formed by the repetitive experience of them in everyday life.

As an active user of the Bayard …

Healing The Black Butterfly: Reparation Through Resources, Danasha Kelly

Masters Theses

This Baltimore-based project works to end mass incarceration in Black communities by reconstructing existing infrastructures in the criminal justice system that fail to address poverty, racism, and unequal access to resources through the untold stories of Black Baltimoreans prior to incarceration. In doing so, this thesis will strive to counter the lack of social and political justice around architecture as it pertains to black people by creating reparations in the form of resources for restorative justice and community before incarceration. Through exploring restorative justice through community-engaged design, the reformer Baltimore City Jail Complex will be used as both a site …

Baseball Camp And Other Stories, Lucas Mockler

Masters Theses

Of the questions I ask myself concerning the making of a painting, the one that continues to drive the work is this - where do the facilities and properties of technique in paint handling meet the action and then final experience of the painting? In the attempt to answer this question I have made work from the building up of my life. I have dug out from the memories of childhood and the metamorphosis of fictions into personal realities. I have added new movements and marks and built abstractions in the dark. The hope would be that as I work …

New Revelations, Ineke Lynne Knudsen

Masters Theses

This project imagines a not-so-distant American future where Christians and conservatives have triggered the Apocalypse. In my paintings of the Apocalypse, all the desires of conservative Christians have come to pass: the eradication of people of color and queer folks, a revitalization of the American frontier and wilderness, and the return of Jesus Christ in the form of the Rapture. I’m specifically painting White conservative Christian girls, and I’m interested in their unique intersectionality of being a White conservative (an identity rife with racist social implications), being female (an identity deeply abused within the Christian subculture), and being a child …

Objects In Transformation, Caroline Coxe Lippincott

Masters Theses

Traces and marks left behind tell the stories of buildings and their materials. Remnants of the past remain, while new construction is layered on top, creating a kind of palimpsest. Artifacts of material time - rust, erosion, growth - are inevitable, yet often feared. Typically in search of longevity, architects gravitate toward materials and finishes that promise durability. My work questions some of the assumptions we have about material quality as a function of time. Through experimental artifacts, this thesis reorients our perceptions of time’s effects on the built and natural environments, and introduces a new and expanded time scale.

Paradigms Of Horror, Xingge Zhang

Masters Theses

“It seems an unaccountable pleasure which the spectators of a well-written tragedy receive from sorrow, terror, anxiety and other passions, that are in themselves disagreeable and uneasy” (Hume, 1757).

Horror, said Adorno in another context, was beyond the scope of psychology. Horror tries to frighten, shock, horrify, and disgust using a variety of visual and auditory leitmotifs and devices, including reference to the supernatural, the abnormal, mutilation, blood, gore, the infliction of pain, death, deformity, putrefaction, darkness, invasion, mutation, extreme instability, and the unknown. Supernatural or uncanny narratives can shape, distort, or reflect the storyline in literary works, but also …

Sub Sequence : Building A Participatory Infrastructure, Aaron Wright

Masters Theses

What might it look like to make the nebulous quality of air pollution visible?

There is a lack of infrastructure that has been constructed in response to the contaminants produced from the Port of Providence in Rhode Island. Air quality surrounding the Port is impacted by air pollution from legacy industrial sites – diesel trucks, marine vessels, oil and gas storage and distribution, asphalt and cement processing, metals recycling, natural gas and utility services, and large heating plants.

The thesis sets out to investigate, question, and iterate upon the possibilities of collective environmental action and accessible information through an individual’s …

Ready Made, Made Ready: Everyday Objects For Everyday Emergency, Dara Benno

Masters Theses

What does it mean to adapt to a changing world?

Climate change is altering the world as we know it. We live in a chronic state of emergency. It’s easy to slip into a downward spiral of despair or ignore what we know to be true in order to carry on with our day-to-day responsibilities. By facilitating a complete recognition and heightened awareness of the common threats brought on by the climate crisis, we can begin to make the mental shift toward living in a new normal.

Ready Made, Made Ready rejects a dissociative attitude and seeks to shift exceptionalist …

Pace/Place/Space/Tempo—The Choreography Of Equity And Expressions Of Black Living, Vessna Scheff

Masters Theses

My skin is natural. My skin is political. My hair is natural. My hair is political. My speech is natural. My speech is political. There’s no such thing as apolitical.

My current interdisciplinary practice in painting and performance focuses on how Black diasporic identities hold, create, and process subsistence narratives. For this research, I am asking the questions: What role does pace play in resistance strategies and how can it be communicated through tempo? How are unspoken histories conveyed through movement, silence, the glance of an eye, fat crackling in a cast iron, pushing play on a walkman, and seeds …

Attuning The Viewfinder, Ian De Silva

Masters Theses

As there are many mobile apps designed to pull your attention, these interactions have become a kind of normalized addictiveness, such as doom scrolling.

I am working on the topic of attention and a meditation app using augmented reality because I want to understand how this technology can be useful from beyond the screen and into a physical space.

Can’T Stop Coyote, Tala Worrell

Masters Theses

I work hard to keep language out of my studio. Language reminds me of my mom’s voice, people telling me what to do, not having the right accent, critiques, criticism in general, mis-truths, and never being good enough. Language is the material of my thoughts, and most of my thoughts, or the ones on a constant loop anyhow, are all those voices over and over again.

Painting is where I get to be me, with myself, and in my body. Painting is my home, family, refuge, and best friend. I’m not looking at myself from the outside, no one can …