Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Rapid Response, James Chae

Masters Theses

Rapid Response is a design practice that responds to the accelerating speed of consumption. It holds a reflective and responsive mirror to our culture of overconsumption. With an informed critical eye and kleptocratic hand, I consume, sample, and render the visual energy of commerce and respond directly in the stream on available platforms and on a number of scales.

Central to this research-based practice is a desire to expand discourse. Through a close examination of commercial language, the visual techniques of corporate branding, and the aesthetic narratives of commercial spaces, I study the persuasive forces of advertising, subvert the myths, …

& Surface, Adam Mickey Porter

Masters Theses

I synthesize nature, night clubs, computer screens and sexual fantasies into an experience that interrupts desire and longing. Fractured elements culled from pornographic magazines, mediation from digital media, and surface tension enable optical and phenomenological effects that make the visible and invisible co-exist together. Moire patterns, strobing lights, iridescent paint, prismatic and flickering bits of visual information pull the picture plane apart. A dialectic process that cannibalizes all content and material, sparing nothing from revision. The nature of material, imbued with it’s own history and beauty is transformed, yielding a surface that holds an image and after-image all at once …

Modus Operandi, Nabil Gonzalez

Masters Theses

Since 1993, hundreds of women have disappeared and died in the border area of Ciudad Juarez Mx. and El Paso TX. The crimes committed towards women of this area have become known as “Las Muertas de Juarez” or the Juarez Femicides. Modus Operandi is a commonly used term by Mexican authorities when referring to an investigation regarding a crime, and it often refers to their particular overly corrupt method of handling crime. This is a thesis project that I started with the intent of bringing awareness and reestablishing an identity for the hundreds of women today’s government and society have …

Li Remembered, Meredith (Yue) Du

Masters Theses

This thesis work arose from my interest and concern in the ongoing transformation happening in China socially, culturally, and environmentally. As a child of hydro engineers, I grew up on the construction site of Lishui Hydro project. In my experience, the hydroelectric plant was a poetic place, a huge geometric structure surrounded by beautiful water and views of mountains. In my research, I found that many people argue against hydro projects, especially Three Gorges Dam, and the main focus of their objections has to do with demolition and the displacement of people from their homes. Through publications, documentary films, and …

Traversing Languagescapes, Desmond Pang

Masters Theses

To maneuver is to design. As a multilingual graphic designer, I maneuver across different languages and their respective scripts. My work invites my audience to take a leap with me into unknown languagescapes.

Through sampling, analyzing similarities and differences, switching applications and contexts, challenging functions, inserting and overlaying recognizable visual systems as well as combining disparate language scripts, I become a guide for my audience, assisting them, regardless of mother tongue, to attain a degree of understanding when faced with an unfamiliar language.

My thesis asserts the critical role graphic designers play in demystifying and cracking language barriers. Every graphic …

Live Edges: All Possible Adjacencies, Rebecca Leffell Koren

Masters Theses

Edge is a deceptive word. It suggests lines, borders, designations—a kind of certainty. I see edge instead as a porous adjacency—the noise at the intersection of planes that adds meaning, rather than separation. Live Edges is a design research practice that is hyperobservational and multi-planar. Equal parts training ground and methodology, what began as an effort to derive graphic form from the intangible qualities of place developed into an approach to parsing complexity.

Setting locality as my origin point, signifiers of place—materiality, behavior, orientation, architectural form—serve as catalysts for graphic response. I interpret landscape in order to construct my own, …

Hyphen Nation: A Reconciliation, Lynn Amhaz

Masters Theses

As a transnational living between Beirut, Lebanon, and Providence, Rhode Island, in the United States, I use my design practice to negotiate, reconcile and inform a cultural identity defined through an equation of two different nations. I am open to what comes from this reality between. Linguistically, a hyphen simultaneously binds and divides a compound term. As a designer, I view the hyphen as a shifting axis for telling stories. In the process, I approach the hyphen as an indeterminate zone — a productive site for authoring systems and suggesting narratives linking two nations — their cultures, languages, times and …

Context Clues, Brynn Trusewicz

Masters Theses

Context Clues explores the tensions between identity and appearance, especially as it relates to queer identities and the bodies that carry them.

It assumes that identity and appearance aren’t always straight forward or line up in expected ways.

It aims to expose our discomfort about this uncertainty.

It explores how we look at and evaluate others; what we observe and what we fill in.

It compares how we look at others and how we look to others.

It critiques the absurdity of how people perceive and interact with each other, by putting them in uncomfortable scenarios and exaggerating awkward situations. …

Obsessed With Obsessions: Design For Obsession, Vara Yang

Masters Theses

Taking the notion of obsessions as the starting point for my thesis, I decided to investigate the daily rituals undertaken by a select group of people. I engaged myself in others’ idiosyncrasies, and found myself empathizing with their needs and desires. I found it fascinating how our obsessions vary so considerably. Yet, at the same time, I realized that each of the obsessions I explored was comparable in that the qualities that defined each obsession were essentially the same.

My thesis uses the obsession of Squeegee Girl as an example with which to demonstrate my personal concept of design. For …

Interplayable Surface: An Exploration On Augmented Gui That Co-Exists With Physical Environments, Hoon Yoon

Masters Theses

The main goal of this experiment-driven thesis is to envision and design an interactive GUI1(graphic user interface) that coexists with physical surfaces. Based on an understanding of user behavioral patterns for getting access to information in these types of situations, experimentations and prototypes are implemented and tested with participants. In particular, to observe the user behavioral pattern for augmented GUI within certain environments and circumstances, this thesis presents several types of participatory experimentations with physical GUIs. The experiment participants were encouraged to participate in re-creates and reorganizes physical GUI, relating to their own situational specificity or informational tendencies they have. …

Practice Makes Practice, Gabriel Melcher

Masters Theses

Graphic Designers today must operate independently of specific tools and media. Modes of production are democratized, and so it is in the ways we choose to operate within these modes that define the value of the field. Practice Makes Practice is a response to this condition, refocusing attention from the products of design as endpoints of process to visual evidence of persistent questioning by the designer.

Through my work I question roles and media, enfolding audience, client, and collaborators into my process. My practice is improvisational, quick, and performative in its response to the specifics of site and circumstance. Through …

Casting Forward: Proactivist Studies In Projection, Lisa J. Maione

Masters Theses

No abstract provided.

The Adventure Of The Immortal Detective: Adaptation And Audience Investment In The Cases Of Sherlock Holmes, Corey Hayes

Masters Theses

In the last ten years, popular culture has seen a number of visual interpretations of the character and cases of Sherlock Holmes. From the films starring Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude Law to the BBC show Sherlock and the CBS show Elementary, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s consulting detective is currently at the forefront of the public mind. However, these new on-screen interpretations of the character represent merely the tip of the Holmes iceberg, and the dedication of their fans is just a continuation of the intense popularity that Doyle’s detective has enjoyed since his earliest appearances in print. All of …

A Case For Monistic Idealism: Connecting Idealistic Thoughts From Leibniz To Kant With Support In Quantum Physics, Erik Haynes

Masters Theses

Through the analysis of idealistic arguments and evidence from physics, it will be demonstrated that monistic idealism has a great deal of explanatory power as a metaphysical system for the reality that one experiences. Some of the arguments that support this claim include the inadequateness of Cartesian matter, the seemingly infinite divisibility of atoms, matter being reducible to sensations, the unnecessary aspect of matter, and simplicity. Evidence from quantum physics includes such factors as the necessary role of an observer in the collapse of a quantum wave function and the element of nonlocality. Psychological experiments including nonlocal communication, the power …

Holy Children Are Happy Children: Jonathan Edwards And Puritan Childhood, Russell Allen

Masters Theses

The eighteenth century is often considered the most important era in the history of childhood. Old Puritan conceptions of original sin and physical punishment gave way to Enlightenment concepts of childhood innocence and rationality. Jonathan Edwards was a central figure who stood in the midst of this intellectual change. Situated quite literally in the middle of the transitioning eighteenth century, Edwards’ attempted to bridge the gap between Puritan conceptions of childhood and new ideas made popular by John Locke. Sometimes the bridge held firmly, and other times it cracked widely. Edwards’ theological and philosophical understanding of childhood was at the …

“First-Rate Eddication”: The Educational Roles Of Merlyn And Dumbledore, Carissa Johnson

Masters Theses

The Once and Future King (1957) and the Harry Potter series (1997-2007) are Bildungsroman stories of young, orphaned boys, Wart and Harry, who endure extraordinary circumstances and become wise, mature, and heroic. The transformation that they undergo is the effect of strong education from their teachers, the wizards Merlyn and Dumbledore. This thesis uses progressive educational theory to demonstrate the model these wizards employ. This study also utilizes a study of discourse grammar and Lawrence Kohlberg’s theory of moral development to discuss the nature of Wart’s and Harry’s education. Because of the moral education demonstrated in the stories, reading them …

Flannery O'Connor And The Poetics Of Prayer: The Analysis Of A Prayer Journal, Emily Wilson

Masters Theses

Prior to the recent discovery of her college prayer journal, kept between 1946 and 1947, knowledge of Flannery O’Connor’s religious influence and activity had been restricted to her letters and published works, such as Mystery and Manners and The Habit of Being. Works such as these shed light onto O’Connor’s background and religious views, making her Catholic faith obvious and explicit. This prayer journal exposes a new aspect of her faith – that is the personal relationship between herself and God shown through narrative. Her prayer journal makes it clear that her external expression of faith, showcased in most of …

Activate The Margins: Framing In Multiple Perspectives; Exploring Marginalia; Intentional Moves And Unintentional Consequences, Hyein Jung

Masters Theses

Today, we are surrounded by multiple, simultaneous narratives with various coexisting perspectives. Within these myriad relational scenarios there is always an unfolding and reordering between inside and outside, center and margin. Margins are not minor. Yet for many reasons we deem them secondary. Activate the Margins redirects attention to these peripheral stories.

As designer, I develop ways to reimagine peripheral content, supporting different angles for understanding the complex relationships at play in contemporary culture. By retracing, reorganizing and reframing the margin, I activate a dynamic interplay between foreground and periphery to destabilize power dynamics. Paratext is the surrounding material alongside …

Recalculating: Navigating In Mediated Spaces, Jessica Tzu-Ying Huang

Masters Theses

This thesis examines the navigable surface of media interfaces as a site of engagement and experimentation – for creating experiences that highlight or subvert the spatial and temporal orientations to which we have become accustomed. An interface often erases the traces of its functioning between user and content, however I am interested in probing this exchange of relations. I look at the threshold as a site, exposing and what happens when the mediation is made visible. Screen and page become performative spaces for enacting perceptions of time, gesture, tactility, scale, and for formal outcomes to arise.

Form, Content, And Form As Content, Bon Hae Koo

Masters Theses

Form, Content, and Form as Content demonstrates form as a tool of communication used to explore the role of aesthetics, play, and order in giving form to design. This thesis maps the journey of an aesthetic critic who makes visible and explicit the structures and symbolic meaning valued in the graphic forms we experience.

The practice draws upon the properties of the kaleidoscope, rearranging form to produce new content that questions the reliability of standards, from corporate ranking to color palette trending. Bearing witness to culture, I closely observe and highlight identities and trends that command high stakes in culture. …

Over Several Networks: Designing Intimate Technologies, Sarah Jean Recht

Masters Theses

Digital dualism, a term coined by Nathan Jurgenson in 2012, suggests that there is a divide between physical off-line and digital on-line realities. With the influence of social media on how people network there is a shift in how we understand this play between realities. Jurgenson believes that the divide is, in fact, a fallacy. Boundaries between the physical and digital are fluid and overlapping. We are working out a new spatial paradigm and system of exchange.

This thesis takes as its focus how our bodies are interpreted and reformed continuously in relation to the network and the discourse. Putting …

Intertwined Pluralities: Designing In The Third Space, Sarah Mohammaddi

Masters Theses

I designed my thesis book to reflect the inquiry at hand—a non-linear, fragmented narrative that can be observed in multiple perspectives. I welcome viewers to read in a traditional manner, following the Contents page as displayed, or engage in a new read of the material by navigating the book using the Live Index.

Yellow pages on the left side display a collection of running quotes from Homi Bhabha's most recent lecture, Translation and Displacement where he spoke of the role of the translator within a multi-centered culture. These quotes can be read in sequential order or in relationship to the …

Music-Play And Communication In Children With Autism And Their Families: An Ethnographic Study, Melanie Makovsky

Masters Theses

This is an ethnographic research study regarding the nature of commun-, ication, musical behavior, emotional expression, and social relationships in children with autism. Four children completed the study by participating in at least three private music-play sessions attended by the child, his or her mother, and the researcher. All music-play sessions were person-centered and child-led. A local public elementary school hosted the music-play sessions in the music classroom after school hours. In addition, the school supplied all the musical instruments used in the study. The researcher utilized the SCERTS Model assessment tool to examine each child’s abilities in socio-musical communication …

Defining Afghan Women Characters As Modern Archetypes Using Khaled Hosseini’S A Thousand Splendid Suns And Asne Seierstad’S The Bookseller Of Kabul, Alexandra Andrews

Masters Theses

Middle-Eastern women, specifically Afghan women, are often misunderstood. Yet, authors Khaled Hosseini and Asne Seierstad use the method of storytelling to show that Afghan female characters are not completely subjugated, voiceless, and powerless—despite how they are often depicted in media. Instead, in Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns, and Seierstad’s The Bookseller of Kabul, Afghan female characters are represented as assertive, risk takers, and heroic. By applying Joseph Campbell’s theory regarding the archetypal heroine to the lives of Mariam and Laila from A Thousand Splendid Suns, and Sharifa and Leila from The Bookseller of Kabul, it is clear that these Afghan …

Madness, Death, And Civilization: Non-European Women Under Patriarchy And Imperialism, Mengying Li

Masters Theses

In light of Wide Sargasso Sea, through which Jean Rhys intends to provide the madwoman Bertha in Jane Eyre with a voice and a life, this thesis attempts to reread Jane Eyre from a postcolonial perspective, arguing that both texts can be read as critiques of the cruelty and inhumanity of European civilization. After the English beat the Spanish at sea, and complete the First Industrial Revolution, it establishes the country as the greatest imperialistic power in the world. The need of labor, raw material, and new market leads them to develop colonies in remote areas like the Caribbean. By …

Royal Advice And Religious Authority In Smaragdus Of St. Mihiel's Via Regia:An Analysis And Critical Edition, Roland Black

Masters Theses

Around 813 CE, the Carolingian monk Smaragdus of St. Mihiel produced the first medieval moral guidebook for a king, entitled the Via regia. The text was most likely intended for Charlemagne’s sole surviving heir, Louis the Pious. Smaragdus incorporated passages from both the Old and New Testaments and provided exegesis meant to guide the king in correct moral behavior. The text asserted the critical importance of the king’s correct moral behavior, and offered a window into the Carolingian court as well as political and religious life at the turn of the ninth century. Presented here for the first time …

Oppression, Evaluation, And Direction: Understanding Character Agency Through The Music Of Wozzeck, Eric Allen Hester

Masters Theses

In Alban Berg’s opera, Wozzeck, the concept of agency is one of fundamental importance. The oppressive dictates of fate and social position are featured prominently in the plot of the opera, and the characters evaluate their relationship with these oppressive structures in order to direct their agency. This thesis explores how Berg uses musical form, leitmotivs, and semiotic topics to show how characters engage in this evaluative act and ultimately find agency in their world. Music-drama analysis in this paper is approached from a Peircean semiotic perspective, exploring how the dramatic meaning behind the music is used to inform …

Interaction Between Human Experience, Landscape , And Coffee Production In The Blue Mountain Region Of Jamaica, Shohei Yoshida

Masters Theses

In today's coffee industry, individual farmers’ identities are hardly visible from the products we buy. Each coffee farmer has different lifestyles and methods of coffee farming. Such information about farmers can make each cups of coffee potentially unique in consumers’ experience. However, there are barriers which make consumers blind from the identities of the farmers making their coffee. I will explain about the barriers, and introduce the way to make consumers associate individual farmers' identities with each cup of coffee they drink. This thesis mainly consists of two parts: a theoretical part and a poetry part. There is a small …

A Feasibility Study To Develop A Missions Training Center To Recruit African-American Young Adults For Global Missions Through Education And Training, Linda Saunders

Masters Theses

African-Americans have too long been disengaged from global missions; they represent less than one half of one percent of all global missionaries. Re-engaging the African-American church community in global missions can be accomplished by recruiting African-American young adults to participate in global missions by way of a global missions training center focused on education and training. For the African-American church to become engaged in global missions there are a myriad of obstacles to overcome; namely, the lack of global missions education and training within the African-American church community. While obstacles exist, they are not insurmountable. The key components for engaging …

Becoming Self: A Jungian Approach To Paradise Lost, Geoffrey Kishbaugh

Masters Theses

When addressing Paradise Lost, the reader is not encountering static characters but is interacting with and being acted upon by highly symbolic manifestations of the primitive condition of humanity‟s collective psyche. In dealing with the figures of Christianity‟s mythos, John Milton creates a text that stimulates the collective unconscious of the reader and draws out the primordial expressions of the self—archetypal manifestations. Subsequently, these manifestations are projected back onto the figures within the text and the reader engages in a dynamic relationship with the poem as both the reader and the figures of Adam and Eve experience the process of …