Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Frontier: Land, Architecture, And Abstraction, Jacob Boatman

Masters Theses

The abstraction of land is a colonial process by which physical land is transformed into a conceptual or symbolic entity. This transformation occurs through various economic, architectural, and cultural practices that imbue land with abstract values, meanings, and functions beyond its physicality. This includes the division of land into parcels for economic transactions, the design and construction of built environments that shape human interactions with the land, and the cultural narratives and representations that ascribe significance to particular landscapes. Through abstraction, colonial powers devalue indigenous perspectives and relationships to the land, reducing them to mere obstacles in the path of …

Equivision Habitat: The Collective Dreamworks, Shixuan Zhou

Masters Theses

近年来，武汉这座充满活力的城市在经济快速增长的同时，也经历了重大的社会变革。城市的天际线不断扩大，新的商业和住宅区正在迅速涌现，吸引了更多的中产阶级家庭。作为武汉的长期居民和观察者，我看到了这种向中产阶级社会转变的诱惑力，但我也敏锐地意识到随之而来的社会成本。武汉向中产阶级社会的转变不仅体现在消费水平的提高和生活方式的转变上，更重要的是，体现在城市空间和社区角色的重新配置上。曾经为低收入居民提供住房的旧社区正在被改造成高端公寓和商业空间。虽然这种转变改善了城市的整体形象，但也导致了原住民的流离失所。这种深刻的变化凸显了中产阶级化的双刃剑性质。在这种背景下，我开始关注那些被这一进程边缘化的人的声音和需求。老年居民失去了熟悉的社区环境，年轻人尽管渴望加入新兴的中产阶级，但仍在为高昂的生活成本而苦苦挣扎。这种日益加剧的社会分层，让我深刻反思了城市更新的公平性和可持续性。本文提出了一种基于集体所有权和通过社区土地信托进行管理的社区模式。这种模式将土地所有权从个人转移到社区集体，确保开发活动优先考虑社区的长期福利，而不是短期的商业收益。其目的不仅是提供经济适用房，还旨在培养一个具有共同愿景的社区，探索在城市发展的同时维持社会多样性和包容性的方法。

The Future Is Over, Dotan Appelbaum

Masters Theses

History is constructed out of the narratives by which we organize the substance of all that has ever happened. Our understanding of the contemporary moment is determined by how we shape our history. The future is a promise that emerges from how we contextualize our place in time.

This thesis starts by acknowledging that the futurity promised by enlightenment liberalism is inconceivable in the face of contemporary horrors and climate catastrophe. Given this reality, what are we doing as designers? With a Benjaminian understanding of and a Foucauldian approach to history, this thesis constructs a history of design that follows …

Untitled, Lucia Steele

Masters Theses

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On The Impulse To Notate, Lydia Chodosh

Masters Theses

On the Impulse to Notate assembles an array of dialogic encounters. Composed in fragments — written and collected, designed and curated — this catalog resists linear narrative formulas to favor an open poetic syntax.

Here, the designer relies on her propensity to notate, aggregate, and persistently recompose.

She materializes language that promotes movement toward knowledge and craft in conversation.

She reads and translates stories spatially, frequently shifting their frames.

Graphic Desire, Michelle Belgrod

Masters Theses

Before I knew about design, I knew about desire. A desire for the new, the beautiful, the promising. A desire that lives on a surplus of surfaces. On packaging, social media, on websites. A desire that makes the job of a graphic designer an object of desire itself. A practice that prioritizes aesthetics over meaning. Expectations over reality.

In Graphic Desire, I complicate the ways that desire affects both designers and consumers. Caught up in our own need for creative fulfillment, we often overlook our impact as the arbiters of desire. Under capitalism, we create work that over-promises a …

Industrial Tenderness, Elbert Girón

Masters Theses

Industrial Tenderness surveys the relationship between visual language, cultural expression, and diasporic practices through the design of functional sculptures. These designed objects seek to communicate cultural legibility, or intuitive cultural belonging, to Mexican-American peoples by challenging legacy notions of design language. Through a proposed design language framework and designed objects, Industrial Tenderness seeks to affirm a pluriversal practice of industrial design.

Legacy industrial design confines design language to a heavily prescriptive canon, resulting in a stark monocultural language that is unrepresentative of perspectives outside of a legacy dominant white eurocentricity founded in thinking from the Bauhaus and Ulm schools. Through …

Life Of Things, Things Of Life, Shiyue Wang

Masters Theses

In a world often captivated by the grand and explicit, my thesis, Life of Things, Things of Life explores the quiet yet profound narratives hidden within everyday objects. Drawing on my background in data design, I adopt a methodology that intertwines subjective narrative with rational analysis and challenges traditional hierarchies of value. Through processes of observation, collection, archiving, and re-contextualization, I elevate what is often overlooked as mundane and fleeting. This thesis not only uncovers the narrative potential of ordinary objects but also repositions them as protagonists in their own right, urging viewers to reconsider their conventional roles not as …

Space Between: Navigating Openness, Torie Stotz

Masters Theses

In a predominantly human-made, constructed world, I am exploring how I can manifest the natural world with a hand made screen divider system, based on form and structure, that replicates that of a work of nature, more specifically simulating dappled light. Questioning sustainability through the limitations of terracotta clay, while introducing a passive, bioclimatic design, I explore how a fragile, rounded, hollow fired system impacts its structural integrity and its ability to embed nature like qualities in modular form. Clay is brittle when thin, dry, or water absorbing material is added; it absorbs water slowly, needs to be a certain …

Homeward Bound: Moving Homes, Moving Home, Ella Nadeau

Masters Theses

The built environment has a powerful way of showing where our human attention and care is, a magic trick of emphasis and deemphasis. We proudly display our assets, wrapping them in light and gold while we shun the background people and places, choosing ubiquitous skins of plastic or brick in an effort to remove them from our visual language. Since we have had people we have had spaces to place them in but where some spaces relay the message that the person inside is a gift to the world, the majority chant a tired monotony of oppressive apathy: you do …

Furnicreature, Yijing Huang

Masters Theses

Project "Furnicreature" reimagines domestic furniture and furnishing as unique 'creatures' with anthropomorphic features such as 'facial' expressions, 'body' gestures, dynamic movements, as well as distinct personalities, to foster interactive experiences. By blending the inanimate with the animate and adding humor into the approach, the 'Furnicreature' project not only cultivates mindfulness, empathy, and care towards possessions but also promotes humility and responsibility. Its storytelling and dynamic design inspire imagination and prompt reflection on oneself, surroundings, and relationships. With sustainability as a long-term goal, Furnicreature aims to encourage a departure from everyday challenges and foster a more mindful and empathetic engagement with …

Dimensional Dialogues, Farida Abousteit

Masters Theses

Dimensional Dialogues, a multi-installation series, offers us a place to interact with language in a way that is whimsical and transcends our need to understand and comprehend language. We remove the tensions of language barriers by finding beauty and personal connection to typography, now scaled up to a human scale and reacting in real time to our movements. A process begins from ancient practices of designing Arabic Calligraphy, to creating Graphic Outputs of that calligraphy, to technologically heavy and new works in creating 3D models of these works that can be projected and respond to human movement. These installations, in …

“Touching The Untouchable”: Time As Material And The Fragmented Self In The Maximodern Era Shori V. Sims © 2024 Shori V. Sims All Rights Reserved Shorisims., Shori V. Sims

Masters Theses

In the conventional division of disciplines, film/video/moving images and stationary sculpture are categorized as formal and conceptual opposites. In my work and in this thesis, I am arguing that moving images constitute a form of sculpture in the style of assemblage by the manipulation of time around them. Yes, the image is flat and stationary on its own: but the cut of time which it represents exists multi-dimensionally (spatially and temporally) to be combined in a collage-like manner. In my practice, moving images constitute a form of assemblage that manipulates time and space in ways normally attributed to sculpture.

This …

Kelly Gang's Last Stand, Alejandro Toro, Special Collections, Fleet Library

11th Baker & Whitehill Student Artists' Book Contest 2025

Entry for the 11th Baker & Whitehill Student Artists' Book Contest. Opening reception and award ceremony Wednesday, February 19, 2025 at 6:30pm, Fleet Library, Main Reading Room. Juror: Roger S. Williams.

Avoiding Pragmatic Oddity: A Bottom-Up Defeasible Deontic Logic, Guido Governatori, Silvano Colombo Tosatto, Antonio Rotolo

Centre for Computational Law (2022-2025)

This paper presents an extension of Defeasible Deontic Logic to deal with the Pragmatic Oddity problem. The logic applies three general principles: (i) the Pragmatic Oddity problem must be solved within a general logical treatment of contrary-to-duty (CTD) reasoning; (ii) non-monotonic methods must be adopted to handle CTD reasoning; (iii) logical models of CTD reasoning must be computationally feasible and, if possible, efficient. The proposed extension of Defeasible Deontic Logic elaborates a preliminary version of the model proposed by Governatori and Rotolo [15]. The previous solution was based on particular characteristics of the (constructive, top-down) proof theory of the logic. …

Lost Stories, Yuxuan Huang

Masters Theses

The owner of the laundromat by the corner of my temporarily sublet room in New York once told me his life story randomly on the last day I went to dry my bedding. We had never spoken before because we both weren't sure if the other spoke Mandarin.

It’s a long and intricate one, so long and intricate that he could write his own book and become the protagonist of a realist novel. If one word could describe this world and the life we all live, it should be “Wuchang.” According to various authoritative Chinese-to-English dictionaries, it could mean unpredictable, …

One Of One Of A Kind, Dominic Rishe

Masters Theses

This thesis probes the discourse around the increasing use of advanced digital tools in art and design, and articulates a paradoxical stance that these tools are re-illuminating a set of old ideas - ideas that have been preserved in a lineage of craft movements, historically perceived as anti-technological, nostalgic, or backwards-looking.

Over the last two decades, the use of generative and computational tools in art and design has evolved from a niche, experimental activity to a fully-fledged epochal movement, rising across all disciplines from architecture and graphic design to film and illustration.

Craft, which has always found its definition unstable …

Repair Rolodex: Exchanges, Changes, And Patchwork Parables, Ethan Howard

Masters Theses

This book is an index of nine exchanges with strangers whom I met online through email Listservs or by word of mouth. In these transactions, I offered to repair broken things for a trade-in-kind payment. Through the brief relationship between owner and designer, each interaction suggests that an object is almost never entirely obsolete despite its perceived obsolescence.

At the core of these trades is a grassroots protest of the landfill and a critique of our global capitalist commerce system. The apparent desire for and nature of these trades demonstrates that stories make our objects meaningful. Each interplay studies peoples’ …

Beyond Display: Crafting Emotional Journeys For Belonging And Connectivity, Jiamin Yang

Masters Theses

In bustling urban areas like Manhattan, New York, the majority of interactions between individuals occur amidst the whirlwind of daily life. Yet, there is an absence of genuine connections within local communities, particularly among neighbors who are geographically close, creating a sense of detachment, untrusting, and anonymity. This thesis involves exploring innovative interventions with the ultimate goal of uncovering novel possibilities in interactive exhibitions, distinct from traditional displays. All of this is an effort to curate emotional journeys that transcend routine, fostering vibrant community belonging and connectivity. Against the backdrop of the city’s vertical living, where neighbor encounters are often …

Snapbot - The Enhanced Physical Play, Morong Li

Masters Theses

Snapbot is a building toy set. It investigates the integration of physical and digital mediums within the realm of play, addressing the dominance of video games in children’s entertainment. By merging Morong’s interests in toys, design, and psychology, this project aims to balance different play mediums to offer combined benefits without diminishing each one’s value.

To address screen time’s dominance, I developed a toy concept for 11- to 13-year-olds that merges physical and digital play. This concept allows for the physical construction of robotic toys that, when transferred to a digital environment, come alive and tackle digital challenges. In this …

The Day The Door Flew Open, Clara Delgado

Masters Theses

A journey is a chance to better oneself, to go and come back anew. This kind of pilgrimage does not only happen in the spectacular realm of far-off travels. Often it happens where the soles of one’s feet comprehend the curvature of the land. Then, without forewarning, time opens a sliding door that appears on the recognized ground. Stepping in, the world is realized in a new way.

The writings that strike my tongue with ravishing bittersweet flavors are fictional narratives, with voyages that sail through day and night, disguised as lovely prose while critically probing the world. This written …

So Far So Good, Cooper Goldman

Masters Theses

What is the most beautiful object in the world?

The thick, heavy, white, porcelain diner mug.

Describe what you make…

Home goods and furniture. Crafted with attention to detail, with materials that you can feel good about.

Why do you make what you make?

Through the elevation of ordinary objects, we can elevate our daily routine.

This Is For You: A Handbook For Design Students, Gabriel Drozdov

Masters Theses

This Is For You is a handbook for design students. It is a collection of stories, projects, and conversations on the subjects of design, code, and teaching. The book’s first part, “Learning,” contains stories about the experiences that shaped me as a designer. The second part, “Making,” summarizes the projects that taught me how to design. The third and final part, “Sharing,” is a series of conversations with the people that helped me along the way. In collecting and publishing these resources, This Is For You is an attempt to create an open-source example of what a career in design …

A Hard-Boiled Hero In An Atomized World: Manuel Vázquez Montalbán’S El Hombre De Mi Vida And Milenio Carvalho Lament Neoliberal Alienation, José Ortigas

Modern Languages & Literature

Manuel Vázquez Montalbán’s Pepe Carvalho detective novels comprise a seminal series, spanning eighteen novels from 1972 to 2004, that consolidated the novela negra as a popular, denunciatory genre in Spain. While much has been written about the early entries in the series, the latter novels, namely El hombre de mi vida (2000), Milenio I: Rumbo a Kabul, and Milenio II: En las antípodas (2004), have not received similar attention. Critics like Colmeiro, Balibrea, and Nichols have accurately read these novels as a denunciation of the most evident negative consequences of globalization at the turn of the new millennium, principally gentrification, …

Infinite Plane: Metaphysical Architecture + Digital Space, Isabella Ruggiero

Masters Theses

In her book, The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to The Internet (1999) science writer/artist Margaret Wertheim posits that cosmology is fundamentally based on how humans interpret space and situate themselves within it. Today's scientific view portrays the fabric of the universe as ubiquitous and undifferentiated in its substance, effectively a single space. In contrast, the medieval perspective delineated space into discrete entities with defined properties—in the case of Christian cosmology, through Heaven, Hell and Purgatory, separate planes with distinct material and metaphysical conditions. However, in the digital age, a new spatial cosmology has emerged, …

Kcpr’S 2024 Audience Survey – Findings, Analysis, & Recommendations, Cayley A. O'Brien, Emily S. Tobiason

Journalism

This senior project explores the audience engagement strategies of KCPR 91.3 FM, the student run radio station at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, and lays the groundwork for future leadership to optimize the station’s platform. The project consists of 10 weeks of audience research, conducted through a survey distributed through social media, on KCPR’s website and at a variety of events. Through a structured methodology using surveys and targeted promotions, we collected data from 83 total respondents, revealing insights into key audience demographics, preferences, and interaction patterns of both content on KCPR.org, and on-air presence both digitally and …

High Frequency: A Graphic Anthology Of Music, Cindy Nguyen

Graphic Communication

High Frequency experiments with the production of both non-traditional book design and graphic design in order to explore the personal relationship that can exist between an individual and music. Key areas of experimentation lie in typography, graphic design, and layout in order to result in a specialized, hand-crafted book featuring custom posters of twenty-five albums that have had particular significance to my personal musical journey. How can one visually represent their emotional connection, journey, and relationship to a body of music? Though this is the primary focus of this project, a secondary goal is to explore how an individual interacts …

Poem No. 131, June 2024, Huntsville Literary Association (Huntsvile, Ala.)

POEM

The Huntsville Literary Association was founded in 1967 to provide a community for writers, readers, and artists through workshops, readings, and educational programs. One of their key contributions is the literary magazine titled POEM which showcases original writings from both established and emerging writers. This issue features poems from various writers.

Jugaatronics, Monica Bhyrappa

Masters Theses

Jugaatronics is a body of work that aims to address the current e-waste issues by designing consumer electronics that are repurposable, creating new electronics and objects. This project is born from the cultural practice of 'Jugaad' - the practice of repurposing everyday objects to extend their usability, a form of frugal innovation deeply embedded in my upbringing in India.

Most electronic devices are often discarded at the first sign of malfunction—deemed unnecessary. My thesis highlights this throwaway culture by integrating the concept of Jugaad(repurpose) into the lifecycle of electronic products, demonstrated as a hairdryer.

By showcasing potential repurposing opportunities at …

2024 Hispanic Theological Initiative Book Prize Response, Neomi D. De Anda

Theology and Religious Studies Faculty Publications

Response to Insurrectionist Wisdoms: Toward a North American Indigenized Pastoral Theology, by Marlene Ferreras.