Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Kainan Liu, Kainan Liu

Masters Theses

Selection of furniture is a very personal thing. Its scale and social attributes also determine that it is rarely sent as a gift. So, it seems to me, that furniture belongs to the category of personal goods, which is a concept worth pondering. What kind of relationship do these mere worldly possessions, these so called "mine" things, whether these are vehicles, houses, furniture, clothes or accessories, have with us? When we say the word "mine", it is a self-definition with confident possessiveness and the free extension of this definition in choice? Or is it a instinctive behavior that you need …

Surviving In A Gregarious World, Shiyang Yao

Masters Theses

Contemporary living leads to advanced communication and transport networks that people nowadays are more likely to live in a solo life. Even so, society has incorporated perceptions of single people and a biased assumption that single people are lonely. Loneliness is a big problem, but being single isn’t a problem that needs to be solved. Some people choose to be single. We should challenge the social norm that being alone is the same as being lonely. My research begins with my own experience growing up in China, but the bias against single people happens everywhere regardless of country or culture. …

Experience The World: How The Ever-Present Accessibility Of Hands-On Opportunities & Play Enhance Logistical Learning, Mary E. Chavez

Masters Theses

Living in a digital age, it is imperative--now more than ever--that children engage in hands-on, experiential learning activities to ensure that their ability to relate to the world is not compromised by technology. Children actively need playful, open-ended and self-directed mental stimulation for their young brains to develop and grow. Public school standards stifle a child’s right to succeed in alternative strengths and inhibit opportunities for self-exploration and self-expression. Game design and fort construction are examples of accessible, hands-on activities in which a child can creatively immerse themselves. In doing so, they can begin to interact with the tangible world, …

Lift A Life, Vidur Madhav

Masters Theses

This project analyzes the role that culture and demographics play in interventions within a pre-existing system network. The research is geared towards understanding how healthcare systems demand different solutions across cultural and geographical boundaries. My work acknowledges and highlights the unimportance given to non-clinical services which results in a stark contrast between the ground reality versus the theory of healthcare design. To approach these larger domains of region-specific healthcare problems, I conducted research in the form of case studies, interviews, and on-site observation on three levels: urban tier 1, urban tier 2, and rural. The resultant design, essentially a culmination …

Utopian Fantasy, Yue Zhuo

Masters Theses

I design furniture and objects to express my utopian fantasy to people. I hope users can imagine the fantasy through the interaction with my furniture and objects. While people are interacting with my works, they become part of the fantasy. My works are the NPCs (nonplayer characters) of a game created by myself, called Utopian Fantasy.

My works are creature-istic, anthropomorphic, and always interactive. They are inspired by nature and everyday life. This series of works I created during my time at RISD express my appreciation for the underwater world and the Internet. My designs beg for interaction and play. …

Cross Your Fingers, Ayumi Kodama

Masters Theses

My work is warm, flavorless and light. Warm in the colors I use and the materials I choose. It is also the feeling of being at home or somewhere familiar. Flavorless because it is honest, humble and respectful of the material and its transformation it goes through into its final form. As a designer, I am the advocate for the material and its possibilities. I listen with my hands and let the material guide me. Light in its weight literally but in hue too. It is open, natural and subtle. My work has many layers, packed with many memories and …

Glurp, Glurp, Glurp, Zihe Gong

Masters Theses

My thesis is an accumulation of many different things. It contains a body of work that consists of furniture, objects, sketches, illustrations, and spontaneous thoughts, as well as improvised writings and images of a variety of things that have largely influenced my own making. For me, design is a discipline that does not come into being through a linear direction. Similarly, I believe that a thesis does not comprise just one single narrative, culminating from one starting point. The process of designing and making is more like the way one prepares a meal - all of the ideas and research …

+ One : A New Companionship, Vivien Mengjiao Han

Masters Theses

+ one is a service that will make pets and their senior owners’ companionship better. By using the home surveillance camera that users already had and machine learning technology to create a matching system that will match with other owners and pets who have similar characteristics in the community, and recommended the appropriate design or products to the user. Our products not only have a series of multifunction daily necessities for both pets and their senior owners but also have a DIY section. The users can download design patterns, and create it at home, experience it before actually buy our …

Erik Degiorgi, Erik Degiorgi

Masters Theses

Where I started two years ago is a very different place from where I am today. At the outset of my time at RISD I knew very little about what it meant to be a designer. I lacked confidence, yet still entered this program with strict ideas about the nature and outcome of my work.

Over the course of four traditional semesters and two winter sessions, I gradually moved away from my original, self-imposed fears and constraints. Not coincidentally, my work expanded into areas I had not conceived of previously. It has been an illuminating journey, and while I am …

Rootless, Lilla Szekely

Masters Theses

This thesis is an attempt to understand the relationship of my art to nature and my sense of rootlessness. I have been imprinted by the places I have lived in yet disconnected from them as well. I am often situated on the 'other side' and as my perspective has learned to shift between the global and the local, between the outsider and insider gaze, I have come to describe this ability as being 'rootless'. I believe this condition is more common in America, the country of immigrants than anywhere else. Our memories are often re-told in the form of stories …

3, 2, 1, Omar Lalani

Masters Theses

Decreation is a term coined by Simone Weil, described as the program in which we “undo the creature in us” , to submit back to God what God has given us - the self. This project has been a personal duty and life long pursuit presented to me in my early religious upbringing. Direct experience and research have broadened this pursuit to discussions around perception, phenomenology, body awareness, and fear of death. In painting, I reflect on the answers provided in these philosophies and place upon it the important job of examining the construction of the self as well as …

This Feels Familiar, E. Winslow Funaki

Masters Theses

This is a book about in-betweenness. It’s an examination of how we identify people and objects, the categories we use to do so, and those that don’t fit squarely into one or the other. It considers the grey areas of identity--race, gender, species, function, living, inanimate. It slips and slides through the ambiguous and indefinite, forever moving, always simultaneously being “both,” “all,” “neither,” and “none.”

Slice Of Life : Theater Of The Dinner Table, Kate Pincus-Whitney

Masters Theses

Through re-imagining the radical emotional, psychological, political, poetic, and story telling power of food, I use the theater of life to set the stage of the table. Conjuring discussion with Chronos and Kairos, the meal is placed within the liminal; where all bodies are simultaneously present and absent. The painting is as much about life as they are about death. Investigating contemporary life and myth making, I explore the mapping of culture through the objects we consume. I view the tablescape as a place of narrative portraiture. Sometimes the table acts as a shrine, other times a commons or a …

Recipes, Camille Chew

Masters Theses

Ingredients and materials can be manipulated and combined to create something new-a transformation akin to alchemy. Vegetables are chopped and brewed into soup; clay is glazed and fired into sculpture; flour. sugar. butter and eggs bake into a cake; ink is pressed into paper to make prints. These processes are acts of magic that are performed in kitchens and studios every day.

After spending all day working in the print shop, I always feel most refreshed and contented once I've cooked a meal and sat down to enjoy it. This past year I began bringing baked goods to class crits …

The Things Of Mind, Yini Luo

Masters Theses

My thesis research shows my thinking and reflection on environmental changes around me in the past and especially the past two years. Through the experience between the city and nature, my research has clarified my different perspectives and explored the expression and reproduction through the print media and glass media.

Slick And Lumpy : Heavy Cream, Emma Fague

Masters Theses

A conversation with myself. A look inside my mind, process, and feelings. Slick and Lumpy. Creamy, oozing, leaking, dripping. Poured, molded, and sewn. Not a body, but my body, big and bursting and spilling out. Two things placed next to each other and observed. Lots of dessert, frosting, squishing, covering. A conversation with a painting, with a building technique. Fetish and healing, leather, vinyl, latex. Private and public space. Identity, imposter syndrome, digital fabrication. Combining and subtracting and stuffing. Is it appealing, sexy, charming, or revolting, ugly and gross?

U+16e99, Bobby Joe Smith Iii

Masters Theses

The general understanding and professional practice of graphic design have been shaped by the perspectives, needs, and desires of white, cis-gendered, heterosexual men in imperialist, capitalist societies. The tools, substrates, professional networks, institutions, processes, theories, grammars, and values that have come to define the discipline have been formed from this position. Consequently, graphic design primarily serves the needs of the settler in settler colonial regimes like the United States. This reality has prompted many designers like myself who come from colonized communities or whose identity troubles this rubric to question the framework of the discipline and our position within it. …

He Makes The Figs Our Mouths To Meet And Throws The Melons At Our Feet, Josh Meier

Masters Theses

He Makes the Figs Our Mouths to Meet and Throws the Melons at Our Feet investigates the relationship between the painted image and the cast subject. By compressing the visual contradictions of pictorial and physical space, my work argues for a simultaneity of conditions and emotions. I am interested in how two material realities can hybridize to produce a new, unanticipated, re-imagined self-portraiture. This thesis contextualizes my recent works within historical frameworks and discourses including other artists’ writings and artworks, philosophies of abjection, feminist and queer theories of embodiment, poetry, film, and stream-of-consciousness memoir.

This Side Of The Air, Madeline Peckenpaugh

Masters Theses

In my thesis, I have chosen to present a collection of stories throughout my life that continue to impact my practice, along with journal entries, gathered notes, and small to large conversations I've had with my peers, parents, visiting artists, and professors. These collection of stories take place in Wisconsin, Philadelphia, and Nepal, ranging in small moments to a span of seven years. I've been writing down words and clues that could lead me to find the thesis-worthy definition of my work and practice. As if someone or something else other than myself holds the knowledge I'm incapable of locating. …

Father Figures, Chris Regner

Masters Theses

I work serially, using autobiography as a jumping-off point for satire, humiliation, and explorations of the grotesque. My paintings tackle a variety of topics, including religious and cultish indoctrination, the use of technology and its effect on societal discourse, and stereotypical notions of masculinity that find their way into every subject I explore. Using my personal experiences as a foundation, my paintings have questioned archetypes found within these themes, all the while challenging my own values and beliefs. I position myself as an anti-proselytizer, complicating the easy answer and presenting morally questionable individuals with the intent of causing contradictory interpretations …

These Inadvertent Marks, Thomas Wilder

Masters Theses

These Inadvertent Marks is a photographic investigation of scuffs, stains, residue, scratches, holes, and blemishes as a complex set of inadvertent marks which possess an inextricable relationship to the human intention to find and make meaning in the world. Excluding marks that are clearly the result of highly substantial accidents, I look to consider those which are largely deemed trivial and peripheral as a means of renewing perception and surrendering to the unconsidered. The photographs included are the result of a process of discovery and close consideration through wandering in my local surroundings: urban streets, private homes, airports, bathrooms, alleys, …

First Sweet Truth, Jessina Lynn Leonard

Masters Theses

First Sweet Truth is a photographic dialogue with mystical texts written by Christian women in the late Middle Ages. These visionary accounts are not only significant historically—many of them are the first known texts to be written by women in the West—but, moreover, provide a foundation for non-anthropocentric knowledge. In our contemporary landscape informed by algorithms and data-driven forms of knowledge, mystical experience inherently defies the logic of our time. Today we largely assume seeing to be a disembodied act. In a constant flow of images, our eyes skim, understand, move on—what the philosopher Laura Marks calls seeing-as-mastering. In contrast, …

Amor Fati, Keavy Handley-Byrne

Masters Theses

I am searching for a way to grieve someone I never knew. At age 26, I was lucky enough to meet the woman who would become my wife. We quickly discovered that there were many coincidences and connections that could be found when we examined our lives a little more closely – our parents shared a wedding anniversary, our fathers each had five siblings, Alice’s parents shared their names with my grandfather and his second wife (Walter and Joan). But what quickly became apparent to me were the links between Alice’s mother and my grandmother. Apart from photographs and memories …

The Knots On The Underside Of The Carpet, Lily Colman

Masters Theses

A woman enters marriage, guided by a rich lineage of strong, lifelong marriages, yet is also caught in a web of misplaced ideals and expectations deferred by culture. She carries the weight of these histories, as well as her own expectations. Throughout history, women have been minimized and shoved into their own separate, domestic “spheres.” Future generations inherit these traumas, which in turn affects how they experience life. When a woman realizes her marriage is not what it should be, that she has been turned into a flat and unfulfilled version of herself and ultimately files for divorce, the weight …

How To Be Simultaneously Precise And Nondescript, Mckinzie Trotta

Masters Theses

As I stood by my car, I kept coming back to the phrase. It is more difficult to hit a moving target. This time, it was not just a passing platitude. I thought more. Just as it is more difficult to intentionally hit a moving target, a moving target is simultaneously more difficult to intentionally miss. It might be easier to hit a moving target if what one is really trying to do is miss it. Isn’t this why car accidents happen? People hit the thing they are by all means trying to avoid. Everyone is in motion and despite …

Make Yourself At Home, Han Seok You

Masters Theses

“Make Yourself at Home” is a personal journey of self-documentation to discover a definition of “home” and family, and to reenact the missing scenes from my youth. As a child who grew up in many different places far away from home, I missed out on many family moments and a sense of belonging. As a South Korean passport holder who has lived mostly in North America, my identity is unresolved. I find myself in the balance between Korean and American. With the progression of this project, I try to reconcile my past in order to gain an understanding of my …

Watermarks : The Catalogue For Home Enthusiasts, Susana Oliveros Amaya

Masters Theses

Not just when tricks are revealed as tricks, but also when they become something else and materials still push one direction but then take a different turn. The wardrobe does not quite fit in your Ford Ka, the shelves are not exactly straight, the bed does not fit the mattress and the cabinets do not line up. The tension between ideals and use opens a space for re-appropriation, one that can reveal and turn its socioeconomic codes against themselves. Perhaps these are precisely the moments of friction when these ideological watermarks can be disrupted.

Madrepora, Elizabeth Burmann Littin

Masters Theses

Exploring materiality and how we’re inextricably entangled with it, this thesis dive into bodily, aqueous, and political engagements for dissolving the human project of separating nature from culture and bodies from environments. This dematerialization practice driven by discursive means has served as an excuse for the industrial exploitation and abuse of the less seen.

Infused by the material turn in feminist theory, I propose to think with materiality in all its wet, slimy, and dusty ongoingness as a way to craft from the living and dying processes that we embody as current wanderers among contamination, scarcity, and ruins.

Proposing a …

A Little More Like Water, Jacqueline Scott

Masters Theses

“The waves broke on the shore.” These are the final words of Virginia Woolf’s 1931 novel, The Waves, which follows the passage of a day at the ocean’s shore. The book serves as a backdrop for the life of six characters: Bernard, Susan, Neville, Rhoda, Louis and Jinny. Interludes are interjected between the chorus of these characters, depicting the arc of life from early childhood to old age and death. The relentlessness of the rhythm of the tide, at first pulsing and hard to ignore, becomes ceaseless white noise that eventually falls to the background. The day’s initial drama—a spectacular …

My Millennial Asian Fetishized American Fantasy, Seyong Ahn

Masters Theses

The perspectives that I present throughout My Millennial Asian Fetishized American Fantasy are South Korean-centric, biased, absurd, skewed, unfair, and real.

Instead of being nostalgic, the contents introduce questions—ones that persist as I examine my design practice. They open a process of dialogue with the present, while provoking a consideration of the future:

1) If I am a product of capitalism and globalization, how might I better interrogate and define my cultural DNA?

2) What is my approach to the evolving conception of graphic design under new (technological, ethical, ontological) conditions?

3) What interests and concerns truly engage me, such …