Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Story Of Stories, Yichu Wang

Masters Theses

I don’t recontextualize objects—I subvert them.

I’m not interested in paying homage to forms or giving them a

second life. I don’t see a fire hydrant and think, “what if it were

a lamp?” I’m not recycling visual cues to create metaphor. What

excites me is the slippage—when an object escapes its assigned

role and starts to unravel. My work imagines this moment: when

function collapses, and the familiar becomes estranged.

This is my version of “I think, therefore I am”—not through

language, but through distortion. By twisting the physical

world, I interrogate our reliance on order, logic, and legibility. …

Parallel Worlds, Mary J. Connell

Masters Theses

When I start a painting, I’m never sure how the painting process is going to go or how the painting will be resolved. I don’t plan things out or make sketches in preparation for the paintings. Each decision is intuitive. I typically have a question, a response from a prior painting. As a result, all the paintings in the studio become related as they respond to each other.

Doubt and curiosity steady my hand, balancing one another out. Through hard work, time, mistakes and the occasional success, a painting gradually emerges from the surface. Sometimes it is lost again for …

From Industrial Building To Affordable Senior Housing: An Idea Book Beyond Code, Weiyi Ma

Masters Theses

This thesis envisions a proposal to adaptively re-purpose Rhode Island’s extant industrial building stock into affordable housing tailored to the needs of its older and more vulnerable citizens. Architectural dignity, in terms of older citizens amidst this housing crisis, is the creation of living environments that honor their autonomy, comfort, and identity through design interventions that provide accessible, luminous, breathable, and socially enriching spaces, reaffirming their rightful place within the community. With humanistic care and logical rigor, it establishes a mathematical framework for assessment and execution, anchored in five criteria: light, air, space, accessibility, and livability, and presents itself in …

Wood In Hand: Open-Ended Wooden Play, Farnaz Dastranj

Masters Theses

This project explores the design of a sustainable, open-ended wooden toy that encourages children’s creativity, collaboration, and physical development. Recognizing the important role of play in learning, the toy aims to connect children to natural materials while supporting skills like eye-hand coordination, flexible thinking, and visual-spatial processing. Free-form linear elements constructed from wood, a renewable, durable, and biodegradable material, the toy invites children to assemble and create various structures using dowels, pegs, and fabric. By offering different connection possibilities and free-form pieces, it fosters imagination, problem-solving, and group play. This project also addresses sustainability by focusing on material longevity, reusability, …

Chasing The Sacred: A Personal Archive, Yiko Yang

Masters Theses

The relationship between humans and nature is like that of a child to a mother, or consciousness to the unconscious. The former arises from the latter, which always holds and shapes it. As human consciousness evolves, the desire to return to the unconscious remains—we are always looking back, searching for that first glimpse of the world.

Thinking back to my childhood, certain fundamental images—archetypes—come to mind. Rooted in the research of Carl Jung and Erich Neumann, this concept also stems from my family’s cultural heritage and my deep, lasting connection with nature as a child. These archetypes reflect the natural …

Ecospiritual Entanglement, Ali Vedad Yüner

Masters Theses

Land breeds culture. It gives us the resources to thrive, and in that process we establish a relationship with its constituents. With a multitude of beings inhabiting the land, a complex web of relationships develop. Biology describes these relationships as food webs; the mass entanglement of organisms in a manner that each organism nourishes the other. These webs are not just mere scientific structures but rather an interpretation of existential connections that every organism in the world, humans included, are indebted to. Food webs are the first stepping stone in the formation of culture, as they account for the engagement …

Of Dolls And Jewels : Keeping As A Strategy Of Care And Belonging, Yuqi Fan

Masters Theses

In this thesis, I will discuss the psychology behind object attachment in the doll-keeping subculture by integrating doll language into contemporary jewelry. I researched the Chinese term “Pi” as an accurate way of explaining how doll-keepers are attached to their dolls. In this 21st century, the widespread use of social media and AI technologies have deepened people's reliance on virtual spaces, leading to emotional detachment in our society. Adopting the concept of “Pi” into contemporary jewelry, which encourages a shift in focus towards external objects, the practice of doll-keeping becomes a form of self-care that compensates for our current loneliness …

Comfort In Contradiction, Yanchen Zhao

Masters Theses

This research explores why modern visual experiences often feel hollow—why suburban McMansions imitate classical architecture and why luxury spaces feel staged. Instead of simply criticizing these aesthetics, I want to understand them: Why do we embrace symbols disconnected from history? What makes them feel familiar and comforting?

Using Jean Baudrillard’s idea of hyperreality and Marshall Berman’s view on modernity, I examine how today’s aesthetics are simulations—designs that no longer refer to a real past but exist as self-repeating symbols. Everyday objects borrow classical decorations without structural purpose, offering a sense of tradition and familiarity without real historical connection. Modernity, while …

Objects Into Things: The Ordinary Into Extraordinary, Michael K. Yirenkyi

Masters Theses

The most intimate experience of architecture starts at the scale of the object, from the slight grazing past the sofa to the painful bump of the toe against the legs of the sharply angled table. These objects have become a huge part of our everyday life and how we navigate the world around us, especially in the home where we spend the most time with them. Yet how many of us are truly aware when we engage with these objects. In a methodology deeply rooted in the design of objects into things, ideas investigated through this process are situated in …

Wooorrmmhooolleess, Kimberly Duck

Masters Theses

By now we all know that the internet is an integral part of our existence. One could argue that this online existence holds equal importance to our physical one. While the lines blur even further and Mark Zuckerberg can’t wait to cosplay the rich computer guy from Ready Player One, I choose to refrain from the existential dread that seems to be inescapable when thinking of the future nowadays. While we often associate the internet with portals (after all, we once called websites “Internet Portals”—in German at least), Wormholes more accurately capture the experience. Portals promise instant connection. But what …

Instrument, Elliott M. Romano

Masters Theses

I compose graphic design like I would a piece of music. Using input sources such as sound signals and noise algorithms, I create generative systems that alter or adapt typography and graphic form to output audio-textual compositions in real time. I call these systems graphic instruments.

In this book, I present a methodology for constructing and performing visual instruments as hybridized, real-time feedback systems, tracing a lineage of apparatuses as well as works of art and design that share a similar orientation. Through short-form essays and interviews with artists who operate between designer and performer, this thesis explores the …

Afrography: Scripting Futures Anchored In Culture & Community, Osmond Tshuma

Masters Theses

Latin and Arabic are the most used writing systems in Afrika, not only because of their functionality but because of colonial history. Colonialism established Eurocentrism as the standard, while Afrikan creations were marginalized and demonized. This thesis investigates various ways of reclaiming identity through typography using the concept of Sankofa, which emphasizes retrieving and learning from the past to build the future. By integrating cultural objects into designs and everyday visual language, we can challenge and reverse the demonization imposed on Afrikan symbols by colonial narratives.

The belief of Ubuntu, the philosophy that an individual’s well-being is intrinsically tied to …

Tree Story, Jia Hu

Masters Theses

What is Nature?

Nature is a system of intelligence. It means designing for efficiency—often by learning from strategies that have evolved over time. In my research, I use patterns to interpret and decode nature.

To explore nature, I began with the red cedar tree, aiming to simulate and predict its growth patterns—forms shaped by both internal biology and external forces. By analyzing its geometry, I sought to understand how trees embody the dynamic relationship between organism and environment. These patterns reveal the adaptive logic of life.

Patterns are central to understanding nature. While tree geometry may appear chaotic, it follows …

Immersive Stillness In Poetic Space: Textiles For An Uncertain World, Dora Hyunjung Kim

Masters Theses

In an era shaped by environmental crises, the erosion of seasonal rhythms, cultural uncertainty, and the accelerating pace of technological shifts, this thesis explores how textiles—through their tactility, atmosphere, and quiet presence—can serve as vessels for meditative and emotional spaces, which I refer to as "poetic spaces." In the midst of countless unpredictable variables and a rapidly evolving cultural landscape, there is a growing need for environments where silence and quiet reflection can unfold. Within this broader context, poetic space functions not merely as an aesthetic concept, but as a vital site for emotional grounding and inner restoration.

This research …

Till Tender, Karli R. Ehl

Masters Theses

Vulnerable, young, sensitive to pain, immature, not tough. These are some of the words and phrases that come up when you do a quick search of the definition of tender. I have felt every single one of these emotions over the past two years in depths I have not before. I have worked tirelessly, back and forth and in between, to try and figure out what it means to become oneself, while slowly untethering myself from the devotion to my Southern family. Trying to find the visual language for this process has transformed me into a tender being with no …

Folding Horizons: Knitted Textiles For A Mobile World, Yutong Li

Masters Theses

We have grown accustomed to living in flux—moving between cities, countries, languages, and digital spaces. Life no longer unfolds in a straight line, but in fragments and transitions, never quite settling. In this restless rhythm—shaped by fast trains, shifting skies, and the invisible current of the internet—we find ourselves suspended in a vast, woven network. Connection is constant, yet motion is unrelenting.

This project begins with a question: how can textiles reflect this state of in-between? I imagine textiles not as fixed surfaces, but as responsive skins—adaptive, expressive, and attuned to change. Inspired by the tensions of contemporary life—surveillance, shrinking …

Patchworks - A Design Framework For Repairing Systems, One Patch At A Time., Jack A. Martinez

Masters Theses

Design interventions for social good often fall short—ineffective at best and harmful at worst. Even successful projects tend to have fleeting impacts. Despite prototyping, innovation, and scaling expertise, designers struggle to create lasting community change. Skills that drive capitalist markets remain underutilized in the social sector. Reducing barriers to entry in the design for social good field might foster a more equitable, service-oriented design practice.

This thesis examines how designers can collaborate ethically and effectively with community organizations to support their missions. It examines the challenges and benefits of applying a ‘patchwork design approach’ to social good through real-world partnerships. …

Time Reclamation, Yuming Hu

Masters Theses

In today’s involution culture or “internal competition”, epitomized by China’s 996 work schedule, time is tracked like a quota rather than lived. Drawing on Camus’ call to make one’s very existence a quiet act of rebellion, this thesis answers alienated time with multisensory design.

Four interventions, the Thermochromic Table, Blinds Light, Dappled Shadows Light, and a haptic Squeeze Timer, using temperature, light, shadow, and touch to stage brief “moments of awareness.”

Instead of urging users to optimize every second, these objects invite them to pause, feel, and enjoy time. Each prototype softens the clock’s rigid tick into a gentle cue, …

Jotographía // Fagtography: On Amor Propio Radical // Radical Self-Love, Jonathan Erick Guzman

Masters Theses

“Jotographía // Fagtography: On Amor Propio Radical // Radical Self-Love” is an interdisciplinary thesis that explores the intersections of queer Chicanx identity, photography, and performance as technologies of survival and self-construction. I construct a speculative archive of Chicanx queer experience through my tripartite personas: Barbí, Luke, and myself—collectively, the Guzman Triplets.

Through these embodied avatars, I embrace rasquachismo, camp, Catholic iconography, and hybrid photographic processes—including Polaroids, AI-manipulated imagery, anthotypes, and installation—to investigate visibility, fragmentation, and ancestral memory. Rooted in Gloria Anzaldúa’s frameworks of la herida abierta and nepantla, José Esteban Muñoz’s concepts of disidentification and queer futurity, and bell …

The Blue Below Still Breathes, Yiyi Wang

Masters Theses

The Blue Below Still Breathes explores disappearance transformation rather than loss—a shift in visibility that reveals the pressures, absences, and structures shaping perception. Across interactive installations and print works, I examine how power operates through omission, fragility, and formal control. At the heart of this practice is printmaking, reimagined as a responsive, impermanent medium that challenges its historical association with fixedness.

The thesis installation features a 5x5 grid of thermochromic screenprints of a concrete wall, where viewer proximity activates a randomized sequence of heating panels. As heat raises the temperature of the surface, a field of blue gradually emerges, breaking …

The Navel Of The Dream, Ella C. Baum

Masters Theses

The images in The Navel of the Dream evoke a state of groundlessness. In this body of work, photographs act as thresholds between what is seen and what is felt, between daydreams and nightmares, and memories and myths. The camera is used as a means to engage with feelings of loss, and reenact the mythos of childhood, as well as the deep waters of the subconscious.

Created in Southern Sweden between 2022 and 2025, these photographs investigate the fallow winter landscape, the liminal space of deep, dark Scandinavian nights and the transformative qualities of ice, snow and …

Silent Veins, Yinghan Zhang

Masters Theses

My art is founded on the scholar stones in my home in China. These are rocks once collected by ancient scholars and poets, who admired their natural forms for their aesthetic beauty and philosophical qualities. These silent creations of nature are at the heart of my creative inspiration. They serve as spiritual vessels, connecting natural philosophy with personal memory. I listen to the whispers of time within the textures of stone and paper through the contemporary expression of traditional techniques such as rubbing and water-based woodcut, allowing otherwise silent materials to speak a language spanning centuries. In this thesis, Silent …

Field Journal: The Excluded Middle, Carrie E. Kouts

Masters Theses

What does it look like to engage with organisms and landscapes at the periphery of anthropocentric value structures? How does one break the internalized myth that the “built” environment is excluded from the natural world? When does a hyper-mobile and hyper-commodified society confront the exponential crisis of animal death? Within this series of journal entries, field notes, collection observations, weird prose, and sensory musings, one will find questions on the nature of being human and the complex narratives of care we encounter in a world shared with more-than-humans. Each handwritten vignette and photograph from daily life weaves a non-linear and …

Transplant Transplant(Ed) Transplant(Ing), So Jung Yoon

Masters Theses

Boundaries shape our lives and identities. The tangible presence of boundaries becomes a medium for engaging with the world—such as who occupies a space and how, or what tools are deemed valid in a design process. These boundaries aren’t always visible; they’re embedded in systems, habits, and assumptions that shape how we move, create, and are recognized. They extend far beyond fixed geographies and the specific positions we occupy within them.

Transplanting is the process by which things are moved or move across boundaries in hopes of being planted, finding a place to stay. Though it can be a search …

For The Time Beings, Tori Hong

Masters Theses

For the Time Beings is a socially engaged installation and artist book exploring the material consequences and future possibilities of sociocultural time theories. Time, in the West, is typically associated with Newtonian linearity, while in the East, time theory relies on Buddhist principles. These epistemologies reinforce hierarchical and patriarchal structures. Centered on Indigenous Asian and Asian American perspectives, For the Time Beings challenges dominant ideologies of existing in time and space.

For nearly a year, I’ve burned handwritten prayers on new and full moons. The ashes of these prayers are incorporated into reverential drawings of chosen ancestors, made with charcoal …

The Portals: Jewelry As A Site Of Escape And Solace, Jung Ki Min

Masters Theses

This thesis investigates jewelry as a medium for emotional escape and psychological refuge, offering multisensory alternative forms of escapism. Rooted in personal experiences of continuous change and instability, the work explores how imagined spaces—constructed through AI-generated and digitally assisted visuals and layered material processes—can serve as intimate sanctuaries. Drawing from psychological theories, surrealism, and escapism, the study positions jewelry as a portable interface that enables temporary retreat without full detachment from reality. The series of work, which integrates transparent acrylic, visual layering, and subtle dimensionality, materializes these imagined spaces into wearable forms. These pieces invite reflective engagement, allowing wearers to …

The Terror Of The Threshold: On Impermanence, Enclothed Hauntology, And Rest, David M. Legrand

Masters Theses

My artistic practice explores the intersections of impermanence, enclothed cognition, necropolitics, and rest as intertwined acts of decolonial resistance. Through a studio practice rooted in transient mediums—charcoal, chalk, and erasure—the work confronts neoliberal and anti-Black demands for coherence, productivity, and permanence. The ephemeral drawings, layered and dissolved on my studio walls, embody a fugitive aesthetic inspired by Édouard Glissant’s “right to opacity[1],” rejecting colonial logics of legibility and commodification. These impermanent gestures mirror Haiti’s silenced revolutionary history[2], as theorized by Michel-Rolph Trouillot, while invoking Vodou’s vevè symbols as counter-archives of survival.

Enclothed cognition[3] is reimagined …

Gamifit, Sishu Wu

Masters Theses

How can we make fitness feel more like raising a pet than checking off a chore?

Gamifit is a playful system that helps beginners build exercise habits by blending AR fitness pets (Fitimals) with a simple physical reminder device (The Dock). Instead of tracking numbers and steps, it focuses on emotional motivation—your Fitimal eats, rests, and grows based on your workout consistency. Skip too many days, and they might get sick... or even leave.

This project uses gamification to bring short-term joy into a long-term challenge, creating a softer, kinder fitness journey—one that feels fun, forgiving, and actually worth sticking …

Designing Between Worlds, Levon Kostandyan

Masters Theses

This thesis reimagines design as a means of cultural continuity—an act of memory, resistance, and transformation. Rooted in the diasporic Armenian experience, it explores how identity is carried not only through storytelling, but through materials, rituals, and objects that evolve across time and place. Through the transformation of pomegranate skin from waste into a meaningful design material, the project navigates the space between symbolism and substance, honoring both the fruit’s ancestral weight and its potential as a living material language.


The work moves between personal narrative, historical research, and material experimentation, engaging with themes of displacement, hybridity, and embedded knowledge. …

Windbound, Selina Kehuan Wu

Masters Theses

Can we navigate reality outside the constraints of chronological progression? As beings seemingly chained to linear time, can memory become a way to transcend this structure—to resist it, to time travel? What if time, instead of a line, is like the wind—non-linear, unpredictable, and both a force of creation and destruction?

Structured around three interwoven notions—the impulse to preserve (why), the forms that time takes (what), and the gestures through which we intervene (how)—this thesis explores how graphic design engages with the mutable, non-linear nature of time. The first notion, memory labor, considers the poetic and emotional …