Arts and Humanities Commons^™

For A Better Normal : Fostering The Informal Sector In Post-Hurricane Puerto Rico, As A Pathway For Economic Stabilization, Jonathan W. Melendez Davidson

Masters Theses

For a Better Normal is a proposal to aid informal produce vendors in post-hurricane Puerto Rico. The project takes the shape of a toolkit that facilitates the creation of a cooperative buyer’s club. This cooperative not only provides vendors with the opportunity to create sustainable businesses, but also acts as a pathway to formalization. The outcome of this thesis becomes a case study for how to re-think the potential of the informal economy in relation to the Island’s economic crisis.

The Dream Alchemy, Yue Tan

Masters Theses

I strive to record and express moments from within my dreams, in order to obviate their elusiveness. I am a spectator in my dreams and sometimes find myself seized by violent and terrific events. These dreams from my subconscious guide me to the part of myself which I do not always recognize in my consciousness. I wish to know where these contents come from, why I have these dreams, or if these dreams are referencing narratives from my personal experience. The contents of these dreams, as well as the act of reflecting on them, call out my shadow––the unconscious aspect …

Talking To Computers, Jen Spatz

Masters Theses

A popular belief amongst UX designers is that the more voice user interfaces (i.e. Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant) speak and behave like people, the more functional they will be. But, conversational mimicry is not the only way a screenless computer can communicate information. The scope of sounds humans can interpret, manipulate, and make is broad. This project seeks to identify ways designers can mine this domain for interaction cues that promote a deeper understanding of digital content and the systems that deliver it.

From Armor To Augmentation : Reclaiming My Everyday Body, Molly Palecek

Masters Theses

My work explores the silhouette of the body and how we can be empowered to augment it. First impressions are formed instantly and inform much of our social interactions, but these impressions are often made with the limited information of a quick glance and the simple outline of a body shape. There is a negative stigma about some body types and this can make social interaction daunting. This is especially true for women in general, for whom physical appearance is closely tied to perceived value by society. It is even more of an issue for women like myself, whose body …

Space, Junk, Brandon Olsen

Masters Theses

Space, Junk acknowledges and embraces the world as a chaotic and uncertain place. Graphic design often directly contrasts the messiness of humanity. Clean and ordered composition can conceal the muddled nature of a subject. The designer's role isn't to force perfection, but to create an aesthetic that accurately represents content. I place value on rips, smears, blurriness, and distortion as well as feelings provoked by variability. Through works created in multiple spaces (book space, architectural space, web space, etc.) this thesis focuses on finding worth in undervalued junk, using mess as a means to represent convoluted issues, and utilizing fun …

The Bird's Eye View, Ipek Kosova

Masters Theses

How can we make sense of the borders between destruction and construction, between matter and ourselves, at the same time? How habitable is a border? How does sound echo and vibrate on the border? Are borders a space of segregation or dialogue? Where is the border between our brain and our own voice? Between the transparent and opaque? Between the paint and the floor? Between the receiver and transmitter? Between the eye and the tear? Are borders monuments of extinctions of human contact?

The self defines itself as bordered and limited. The moments where destructive events seem like a ruin …

Foodways For Earthlings : Recipes And Tools For Eating In Extreme Environments, Maggie Coblentz

Masters Theses

Studying how food is made, consumed, and appreciated in extreme environments can help shed light on how our experiences of food extend far beyond that of mere nourishment. The social and preparatory food-based rituals found in even the most challenging conditions can lead to a deeper awareness of the role of food on earth today, and can illuminate how humans might eat in the future. This thesis examines the roles of food in war zones, in prisons, and in space to inform speculative recipes and food-based experiences.

Journey Through The Wasteland, Songlin Li

Masters Theses

I started planning this book at the end of last year, because I had to write it for my thesis, and also because I saw this as an opportunity to create, like making artwork. But the difference is that this does not look like my usual art, being only a book comprised of words and images.

From the end of last year to the beginning of this year, I experienced a terrible spiritual disillusionment and was caught in a cycle of depression and anxiety. Even though I was prepared to write this book last fall, I only really started in …

Lingua Franca, Tatiana Gomez Gaggero

Masters Theses

Lingua Franca examines how graphic design and art are used as a common language between people who speak the same language, speak different languages or have distinct cultural backgrounds.1 Understanding languages as living systems that are in constant movement and in direct relation with cultures, this thesis looks at graphic design as a platform for coding and decoding language, shaping and reshaping it.

My fascination with the relationship between culture, language and linguistics led me to investigate topics such as context collapse, the evolution of Spanish in Latin America, and notions of identity, gender and translation. In a moment of …

Harmless Studio, David Thomas Pittman

Masters Theses

This thesis project is oriented around a vegan concept brand called “Harmless Studio.” The project recognizes that industrial design causes and supports the harm of animals through the use of animal materials. This book presents the historical, social, and scientific background of the human-animal relationship as it exists today, and it challenges the common acceptance of that relationship as it is— ultimately suggesting that industrial design need not harm animals to serve human needs. This vegan approach to design is presented through a selection of sustainable, non-animal materials and objects made from those materials. The objects are presented as part …

Reading Rooms, Jinhwa Oh

Masters Theses

Reading rooms examines a set of three conditions for diverse modes of spatial reading. These conditions originate from three common terms: object, space, and performer, which I have subjectively defined through my thesis work. I hope to clarify my own design methodology by examining these terminologies through the thesis process.

I regard printed media as independent objects which have physical qualities: material, texture, volume, and depth. My practice emphasizes physical forms as architectural structures which can be transformed and evolve through readers’ interpretations of the objects. The true communication with my physical work can be realized by touching, moving, and …

Squishy Play, Lauren Traugott-Campbell

Masters Theses

Work is part of our identity and dictates how workers spend most of their time in the US. This obsession has truncated our imagination and ability to conceive of alternatives. As a tactic to reclaim free time, I offer a practice I refer to as squishy play in which participants momentarily adopt new social norms to collectively discover new ways of engaging with the world and each other.

I use squishy play as a lens to investigate the power structures, social norms, and material output of late capitalism in the US. Squishy play is generous in its frivolity. It is …

Placefulness, Ellen Christensen

Masters Theses

Graphic design has been referred to as a tool of inquiry — a method of thinking visually. Design can polish, beautify, hierarchize, eliminate, prioritize, propagandize, or disseminate. Using spatial inquiry as a primary mode of investigation, I argue that graphic design is also a process of attention and care. How can graphic design be a tool of expansion and inclusion?

By encouraging spaces of attention and listening within the built environment and virtual worlds, we can think critically about power dynamics, interiority and exteriority, and subjectivity and objectivity. Within this phase of late capitalism, I focus on leftovers, scraps, and …

Tiny Diasporas, Angela Lorenzo

Masters Theses

I see myself as a literary curator — I collect and sequence texts and images, both digital and analog, to reveal, connect, and construct narratives, resulting in shifting meanings and significances. Inhabiting this curatorial ethos, I investigate hidden subtexts, locating personal and collective relations to the margins and files marked “miscellany.” Working in books and installations, I engage with the inherited meanings of visual languages (form, typography, color, material, format) to open up well-worn narratives and craft new interpretations.

Tiny Diasporas is a primer to a design practice that borrows the form of an abecedarius, an alphabetical wordlist for learning …

Hyperlink : Connecting Space, Time, Language, And Technology, Marie Otsuka

Masters Theses

This thesis constitutes a methodology for examining our use of systems and tools. We are constantly generating physical and digital residues, and tracing them can reveal an underlying syntax of structures that produced them. I work with these artifacts to highlight the capacities and constraints of language and technology, and what results is a transparency that draws us closer to the raw material. Once broken down into bare elements, new forms can then be resynthesized. Both critical and celebratory, this inquiry uncovers logical structures to reimagine means of making and to create alternate tools for thought.

Circle, Loops, Straps, Tracks, Towels, Laura Thatcher

Masters Theses

When running, thoughts come and go and disappear otten before I can solidify them. I can only really hang onto a few but it's liberating because it allows my mind to leap from one thing to the next by way of lucidity. This brings an experience of felt time or the sensation of time passing. I can slide rhythmically from the haptic to the elusive while passing quickly through places and ambiences.

Radically Normal : The Menstruation Issue, Kathryn Smiley

Masters Theses

Hey readers, Periods are normal. But you’d never know that by checking out the average bathroom. The only menstruation-related public restroom fixture considered remotely standard is the trash, the one used to hide the evidence. A tampon dispenser is a rare sighting –a functioning, stocked dispenser, even rarer still.

Dispensers’ exclusion from public space reveals the ways that menstruation is not treated like other natural body functions. Instead, it has long been considered a sign of imbalance and weakness, discussed mainly in hushed tones and sly euphemisms. Historically, the medical profession has greatly contributed to cultural anxieties about women and …

Really Clean No Problems At All, Christina Johnston

Masters Theses

Soap made with a single hair from someone you kind of know.

Porcelain vessels that seem to bubble up with anxiety from the inside.

A blanket made from surveillance footage of an intimate moment on a car.

When we use these objects, it’s hard to say if we’re touching another person or not, or if they’re sensual or synthetic.

This book presents a collection of domestic objects titled Really Clean No Problems At All. This collection focuses on post-digital culture’s increasingly dissociative relationship with bodiliness, intimacy, and hygiene.

This collection alters objects that live in our deep memories — things …

Dispatches From Planet Nowhere, Aaron Field Simmons

Masters Theses

Dispatches From Planet Nowhere explores how using the tools of fiction can aid and expand User Research and Product Design in the field of Industrial Design. The thesis asks the fundamental question of how imagining other worlds can teach us about our own. Aaron’s belief is that using the lens of fiction, and especially science fiction and fantasy, can give us novel and unique insights into what people hope, fear, and dream about the future. Drawing on the fields of Speculative Design and Future Studies Aaron proposes a new method for gathering user data, and a participatory model for understanding …

Capes Make The Man, Khalid Mezaina

Masters Theses

‘Capes Make The Man’ is a project that provided me with the opportunity to grow as a designer and an artist. Over the last two years at RISD, I’ve frequently asked myself questions about my place and role as a man in the United Arab Emirates, and what awaits when I move back after graduating. Using personal narratives and cultural symbols from home, I bring to life the archetypes I carry as a mature masculine – my king, warrior, magician, lover and dancer. The end result is a series of bold, wearable capes, resembling stage costumes worn by pop stars …

Cosmic Whatever, Cement Gardens, Luminous Shade, Winifred Vaughan

Masters Theses

My work is an assemblage of disciplines, reductive processes, and accumulated materials interpreted with a painterly quality. Slipping away faster than we can grasp, the unrelenting forces of time propel us forward. Memory fragments our chronologies, transforming our existence into a collaged fabric. Layered transparencies allow the three chapters of this thesis, Cosmic Whatever, Cement Gardens and Luminous Shade, to bleed into each other turning them into composed cycles. These unlikely combinations permit freedom to experience a narrative that is both vast and intimate.

To See Again, Ada Goldfeld

Masters Theses

Contemporary criticism often describes realist paintings as facsimiles of our world, mimetic copies of a shared reality. Cast as a singular approach to painting that, with practice, any artist may adopt, realism is seen as an easy way out, which has been superseded by more complicated, advanced, and abstract visual languages. It is in this context that describing a painting as “realistic” becomes a backhanded compliment— recognition of acquired skill, but a jab to creativity—and all the more of a slight given the value that contemporary art has placed on de-skilling.

These blanket statements around realism misrepresent the tradition, diminishing …

Domestic Disorientation, Marisa Adesman

Masters Theses

At the center of all human life is the idea of ‘home’, and although this notion has persisted across time, the specific ideas and meaning of that word have changed significantly across the millennia. We are now in an unprecedented time of rapid change and social, economic and political upheaval, and from where we stand now, it is important to explore what ‘home’ means to us today, at both the individual and collective level.

The domestic space of the home, and the rooms within, represent a politicized site vis-à-vis gender, and these gender dichotomies are perhaps most prevalent in the …

Sky Well, Molly Kaderka

Masters Theses

Since the era of Romanticism, landscape painting has fallen into three aesthetic forms of representation: the Pastoral, the Picturesque, and the Sublime. This last form celebrates the awe and fear that arises through human encounters with nature. Many contemporary critics dismiss the Natural Sublime, claiming either that technology has replaced nature as a source of the sublime, or that humankind’s present-day destruction of nature prevents our also standing in awe of it. I disagree with both arguments. To me, humanity’s disruption of Earth’s ecosystems does not impede an individual’s experience of exhilaration witnessing, say, a volcanic eruption. And modern technology …

A Natural Circus, Cecilia Plasencia

Masters Theses

I’ve come to the conclusion that I have no interest in controlling and manipulating matter to my own heart’s content. I’m rather bored of rigidly perfect geometries and sentiments. Rather than controlling materials I allow them to do as they please. I capture their moment of revelation, and allow them to speak for themselves. I realize this process of making demotes me from creator to conduit, but I’ve noted that the materials have a far more unique and intelligent message than I could ever imagine.

So, I listen to matter. Matter has one very good friend, the center of the …

Ghost, A Stone, Audrey Blood

Masters Theses

This is a book of cement and paper. It addresses questions of surface, self, interior, and relations with the environment. It points to emotional and affective geographies in the context of printmaking.

Fungible Commodities, Kelly Taylor Mitchell

Masters Theses

This is an unbound portfolio printed using polymer plates on the vandercook press, in Providence, Rhode Island. The portfolio was created as a supplement for fungible commodities, a series of three multimedia installations.

The Contested Landscapes Of Mnemosyne : Constructing Maps Of Memory, Valeria Rachel Herrera

Masters Theses

This is an unbound portfolio UV printed on plexiglass containing fragments and scenes from my master’s thesis The Contested Landscapes of Mnemosyne - Constructing Maps of Memory.

Tightrope Walking On The Red Lines, Arghavan Khosravi

Masters Theses

My work is deeply connected to my own personal experience of the culture and politics of my homeland of Iran. I was born and raised in Iran in a nonreligious family. I experienced the first decade after the 1979 Islamic Revolution as a child. The hardliners had taken power, society suffered tremendous suppression, and Iran was at war with Iraq. My memories are filled with so many occasions in which the dominance of the oppressive regime affected my daily life, from being forced to wear a headscarf in elementary school, to being required to pray and recite the Quran at …

In A Distant Land, Ohad Sarfaty

Masters Theses

For the past few years I have avidly collected oral histories, family memories and imagery as a way to better understand and contextualize myself, my roots, and my own personal path. My recent paintings reference my first-hand experience as an immigrant, as well as my family's long and complicated history with displacement. The paintings were put together much like a game of telephone, their narratives transmitted through generations, stretched and skewed by family members and friends, rendering them fragmented yet crystallized. In the process of painting, seeing parallels between the past and the present has been frustrating and disturbing. The …