Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Body Extended, Yi Yang

Masters Theses

The book isn’t meant to have a center. The book is not meant to be read in order.

A book is made up of different dates and different speeds.

The chapters of the book delve nonlinearly into a range of philosophic, scientific, and political subjects connected by threads of ideas that go off in different directions at different speeds and different intensities.

Accompanying my research, memories, and project documentation, I record personal anecdotes that reflect my passion and my obsessions, as well as lay the foundation for the included work.

The book is a map book, a roots book, an …

El Suelo En Duelo, Mariana Ramos Ortiz

Masters Theses

This is a thesis about colonialism.

When I was seven years old I interrogated my mom about the consequences of Puerto Rico achieving its independence from the United States. I remember asking her “If Puerto Rico gains its independence, would that mean that we would no longer be able to purchase apples at the store?” The warm climate prohibits apples from growing in Puerto Rico. I never liked apples, and would much rather have had oranges, but I guess that concerned me at that time. She looked at me with a funny look. With that funny look that any parent …

All Bodies Wander, Haley Mackeil

Masters Theses

This thesis describes how aspects of the environment can evoke the presence of a living organism. It discusses several projects by Haley MacKeil that are based on research within the natural world that includes documentation of sites, processes, installations, and artifacts made through video, glass, and papermaking. MacKeil’s practice forms a threshold between two worlds, two bodies, two different understandings—it creates sites for connections with something, someone, or a place that cannot be directly accessed.

Sapping, Smudging, Staining: A Feminized Body, Breslin Shea Bell

Masters Theses

This book—of poetry, prose, and lists—muses on the effects of liquidity and leakiness of a feminized body. By bringing echo narrative, illegibility, de-telling, and that which is continuously wet to the viewer’s body and space, this book and accompanying multimedia installation provides a lens to consider reproductive rights, body autonomy, and gender-based aggression and violence. Work of matter and color investigates interiority, both bodily and spatial, as it relates to surface, access, and space-making.

Hybrid Garment, Diya Wang

Masters Theses

What is in the overlap between jewelry and clothing? Does the combination of jewelry and apparel create a new, significant,way of seeing art?

Hybrid Garment is a series of work that explores the overlap between fashion and Jewelry. As an artist and designer, my background and training prepared me to dissect and rebuild the relationship between and potential of jewelry and garments. The potential of hybridity serves as a methodology to combine and conflate the two disciplines.The essence of this work carries the idea of inclusivity, it encourages people at all levels to wear them. In addition, anyone wearing it …

Material Encounters: Making Memory Beyond The Mind, Ariel Wills

Masters Theses

Can acts of making carry the memories of our embeddedness within the world? This thesis explores how making things can nurture a sense of kinship that cuts across the organic and inorganic, erasing the distinction between living and dead, material and spiritual. Through handwork such as art-making, sewing, knitting, cooking, woodworking, and beyond, the burden of remembering and of archiving is shared across human and non-human bodies, cultivated through practices of making, and through the materials themselves. By recounting the stories of my family’s experience as Jewish immigrants in the United States, I aim to reveal how their domestic practices …

A Journey To The Deep Self, Fengkun Yu

Masters Theses

Filling the empty corners and walls with my favorite stuff in my house is essential for me to feel secure. Thus, I make pieces that I imagine being surrounded by the best collection by placing and organizing them in a touchable distance, such as wall shelves or bookshelves in my own space. I feel both physically and mentally comfortable with the atmosphere that these objects create and convey to me as a relatively sensitive and introverted person.

The state of being free from agitation and disturbance to me is the prerequisite to conduct studio practice. Being able to focus on …

Mars Is For Fags, Justin Quaid Grubb

Masters Theses

The overarching theme dealt with in my work relates to the Space Age - specifically the predictive futuristic approach to product design and the pop culture that came out of the movement. During this time, technological advancements permeated American culture. Manufactures made the future accessible to everyone and futuristic living became symbolic of innovation, progress, and prosperity. A blueprint for a futurist suburban utopia was forged and the American people were ready to embody the new “American Dream.” Residential Mid-Century Modern architecture emerged as the new site for this dream and along with it came a new way of life. …

Beauty Still Lives Here: Narratives Of Radical Self-Love, Deshun Peoples

Masters Theses

This exhibition is primarily concerned with the act of taking up physical and socio-political space. Through the use of form, design, color, and installation this work places various histories and traditions of both ceramics and resistance in communication with one another. The red, black, and green of Marcus Garvey’s 1920 Pan-African/Black American flag are proudly displayed against a warm, calm, pale green backdrop to highlight the importance of mental health in all endeavors, especially in the emotionally taxing labor of social, political, and economic protest in the battle for humanity, life, civil rights, equity, access, and decision-making power.

Fableware From The Garden Of The Grotesque, Matt Becker

Masters Theses

In biology, a chimaera is created when two zygotes collide at an early stage of development, resulting in a unique creature containing two distinct sets of genes. The name is borrowed from Greek mythology where chimaeras are fire-breathing monsters born with the mixed attributes of lions, snakes, and goats. As creatures of myth, chimaera represent a narrative union of disparate parts; a collision of the fantastic and the mundane.

Clay can be used to explore this dichotomy, utilizing its ability as a mutable canvas to embody a vast range of visual vocabularies while referencing its rich history and placing new …

Control Theory, Colin Yoon

Masters Theses

When people feel that everything is out of control, their natural response would be to turn to a designated space to manipulate anything within it, whether a physical environment or a digital platform. This book expresses the comforts of order and predictability in response to the chaos and confusion that emerged from the train wreck known as 2020. After everything that has happened, it’s understandable that people want to have some semblance of control over something in their lives, as predictability makes them feel safe, intelligent, and powerful.

Loose Threads / Hilos Sueltos, Estefanía De Ros

Masters Theses

In this body of work, I’ve collaborated with four artisans from my home country, Guatemala: Apolonio Vicente, Vinicio Vicente, Mario Poz and Manuel Otsojay. They all use traditional craft methods with natural materials: wicker, wool, and cotton. I interweave, overlap, and knot mementos from my childhood with current ideas and dialogues that contain loose threads to the work. All of the layers merge in fluid forms with texture and movement. The curtains let light in, the rug sets warmth, and the “cayuco” invites you to slow down.

I aim to push back against the devaluing of craft traditions, especially in …

I Just Can't Get You Out Of My Head : Frenetic Vortex, Animal As Image - Field Notes (1989-2021), Steffanie A. Padilla

Masters Theses

This essay is an attempt to describe a hypnosis induced by media through the accumulation of images in everyday life starting the day I was born. Raised by television and the internet, I go through a chronological timeline of my life selecting banal memories to showcase how violence to animals became neutralized/rendered invisible. The work is primarily concerned with mental health while focused on the youth, ecological destruction, and how sensory overload keeps us from knowing ourselves. The motivation of this paper is to better understand how our environment shapes our reality by using a psychological, media theory, and cognitive …

This Trash Is Someone Else's Problem, Lauren Goodman

Masters Theses

This Trash is Someone Else’s Problem reimagines object design practices through a decolonial lens that embraces responsive approaches to the local environment and the communities that steward it. It advocates for design justice and social equality. The physical work was developed from discarded scraps of industrial waste harvested from the Providence area, such as wire fencing, oil drums, rebar and steel tubing. It was created without the use of expensive tools, machinery and materials in favour of a less extractive approach to design. In conjunction with the studio work is a series of community gatherings focused on low-fi ceramic pit …

Psychological Well-Being Through Music Listening, Majed Boughanem

Masters Theses

Design has gotten good at delighting and stimulating us in the short term. Could we design products that are good for us in the long run?

In this project, I looked at positive psychology for concepts to develop into features of products and use music listening as a vehicle for integrating them. I propose three music-listening features that help exercise and cultivate emotional regulation strategies:

1_The Reaction Tile

2_The Monofilter

3_The Vibelist

Each feature represents one or multiple strategies from the Process Model of Emotional Regulation.

Beacon Public Library: Expanding Radical Civic Care For An Uncertain Future, Katrina Machado

Masters Theses

Stressors like climate change will put strain on our communities, making them more vulnerable. I am asserting and expanding the role of the public library as a civic space for radical care and community resilience. This work explores the ways in which the public library, as an existing institution, could adapt to the needs of its changing environment and community. Interventions are visualized by a librarian’s jumpsuit and library apron, an adapted library book cart, public signage, and a re-imagined library card.

I imagine a public library that pushes the bounds of its physical building and actively and compassionately serves …

Ars Technica, Bayan Mashrequi

Masters Theses

It’s easy to forget that we are living in an age of wonders, where the ability to perform feats that would have seemed divine miracles to our ancestors, has become mundane and routine to us. Even for people who are practitioners of this Modern Magic, the artificers and the sorcerers, the wonderfulness of the endeavor becomes difficult to appreciate most times.

Ars Technica serves a two-fold purpose here: for the uninitiated and the novice, this book aims to inspire and enable students, engineers and tech aficionados by highlighting the connection between mythology, literature, history and folklore with the wonders of …

The Art Of Microbe Maintenance: Value And Applications In Design, Yujin Hwang

Masters Theses

My thesis centers around designing microbial systems and objects for a sustainable future. I propose ideas to bring microbes into the home in order to make people understand them as a part of the environment. Through deep consideration of how my microbe based material could change across national and social contexts, I create accessible, attractive and friendly-looking design objects with microbes that address people’s fear of microbial life. I strive to facilitate the intersection and interaction between people and technologies in ways that are ultimately harmonious for the well being of both.

My ultimate goal for my thesis is not …

Distilling The Narragansett Bay, Parker Ives

Masters Theses

My thesis is an investigation of material vernacular and a celebration of process and material. I am manipulating locally sourced materials to pull out unexpected qualities in order to distill a unique identity associated with a place and the things that give that place its character.

The resulting work focuses on distilling the Narragansett Bay through the lens of three categories. Reminiscence, Impression, Composition. These works fall into the categories of being reminiscent of a place, impressed upon by a place and composed of a place.

This thesis is not a conclusion of this area of inquiry, rather it seeks …

Polyrhythms, Kevin Costante

Masters Theses

This work strives to integrate seemingly ‘distant’ practices into a concept by emphasizing their differences. A syncopation between a maker and designer, a planner and improviser. A search for commonalities in the middle of what otherwise creates conflict. I cultivate a space to play alongside my inherent formalities by incorporating color and movement. I find rhythm persists uninterrupted through the discrepancies of my process and inspirations. I want to see it in the outcomes of my work.

How can I be compatible with this world of rudiments and structure and also comply with my reliance on ‘chance’?

An Evolving Process: Patterns And Objects, Shreya Tuli

Masters Theses

This thesis investigates my life experiences,inspired by the surroundings in New England and India.

My process is characterized by a multidisciplinary approach. I integrate diverse media moving fluidly between two dimensional and three dimensional work, creating multiple layers of pattern and objects.

Ctrl Shift, Kit Son Lee

Masters Theses

CTRL SHIFT makes a case for design under contemporary computation. The abstractions of reading, writing, metaphors, mythology, code, cryptography, interfaces, and other such symbolic languages are leveraged as tools for understanding. Alternative modes of knowledge become access points through which users can subvert the control structures of software. By challenging the singular expertise of programmers, the work presented within advocates for the examination of internalized beliefs, the redistribution of networked power, and the collective sabotage of computational authority.

Taking Care, John Dixon

Masters Theses

We’ve come to live our lives on a quest for what we deem as efficiency, but has our view on the matter been focused on the wrong measures? Taking Care investigates efficiency utilizing a variety of different comparative measures through the creation of 8 chairs. When our emphasis on certain variables is shifted, is mass production the most efficient means of making? What about one-off production utilizing local materials? Does industry’s approach to ergonomics focus on efficiencies benefitting the employer while sacrificing those of the employee? Working from a Wendell Berry quote contrasting care to efficiency as a point of …

Dress Your Chair, Yumeng Gai

Masters Theses

Upholstery is the dress for furniture. As apparel for humans, upholstery has the power to shape the identity of furniture. By changing different upholsteries, furniture will have fresh identities that bring vitality to both the furniture itself and the surrounding environment. And during the process of changing “cloth” for furniture, people will build a deeper relationship with the furniture they already have.

Dive, Aparna Sarkar

Masters Theses

In my thesis paintings, abstracted bodies collide with sticky shapes and residues in otherworldly spaces to form a queer, diasporic mythology. Bodies are slick, crusty, diaphanous, partial, chunky, other—they vary in legibility, suspended in emergence and expulsion from the environment. Multiple selves make these works. One asks sensorial questions of painting: what feelings, memories, and experiences can I transmit through color and material? I embed the smell of marigolds, the swi!t temperature change of the California desert, or the thick haze of a three a.m. dance floor make-out. My trusting self follows visions of color and shape, believing that they …

Personal Positioning System, Laura Diez De Baldeon

Masters Theses

Personal Positioning System (PPS) is an exploration of spatial memory in an unstable world. While the GPS gathers many different, shifting data points in order to provide us with an apparently stable representation of our position, a longitude and latitude in the earth’s grid, PPS offers alternative forms of mapping based on a more flexible unit: memory. PPS reverses the directionality of the GPS and returns to the fragmentary; it disperses rather than unifies, offshooting in different directions, overlaying the intimate on corporate territory, chasing the shifting flow of geographical information. It conceives of design as a spatial practice, one …

Open Articulations, Matthew Bejtlich

Masters Theses

Open Articulations invites an exchange between human and environmental worlds through cycles of improvisation, reflection, and rebirth. It is a study of how exchanges emerge, what forms they can take, how they are mediated, and how we can sustain them with each other and with our surroundings. Through our coordinated immersion in landscapes and our spontaneous creation in them through frameworks encouraging play, we channel the spirit of a jazz drummer riffing with his midnight quartet, exchanging rhythms, images, sounds, movements, and textual fragments. A gentle breath, a flickering sensation, a gesture: expressions of a specific time rooted in a …

Refiguring Relations, Daphne Hsu

Masters Theses

Refiguring Relations sets conditions for interdependence and visualizes the affective relationships that people have with one another. Through scripts and participatory experiences, my work explores, challenges, and formulates expressions of collaboration. I extend spaces of overlap between individuals to encourage connection and alliance building, however temporary, slow, or small. In reading experiences, both print and digital, models of circulation and accessibility allow the audience to see and affect each others’ interactions. This thesis assembles methodologies and blueprints for reciprocal engagement, between designer and collaborators, designer and participants, and among participants themselves.

Future As Medium, Georgie Nolan

Masters Theses

FUTURE AS MEDIUM through critical examination develops a working premise for advancing designed visualizations of the future. In an effort to build new models of practice that consciously work towards the future, I undertake a set of delicate negotiations rooted in critical inquiry as well as creative production, all expressed across three temporal contingencies: yesterday, today and tomorrow.

I work the terrain of the past as an assembled archive of speculative worlds created by architects, designers, and artists, and problematize the mediation of futures through a close reading of their world-building tools. I use this archive to make sense of …

Jettisoning The Frame: Strategies For Designing At The Threshold, Will Mianecki

Masters Theses

Jettisoning the Frame: Strategies for Designing at the Threshold explores graphic design’s capacity for facilitating critique and understanding of accelerating systems of technological control and complexity. Working across archives, architectures, and infrastructures, designing at the threshold is an approach that takes the opacity of systems and subjects alike as a starting point from which new possibilities, configurations, and relations emerge. It is a loose methodology predicated on shifting, jettisoning, and reorienting the role and frame of the designer from objectivity to subjectivity. From neutrality to implication. From scientific to messy. From solutionism to something else.