Art and Design Commons^™

In Exchange, Anna Mcneary

Masters Theses

This thesis parses the dynamics of emotional labor in personal relationships. By bringing softness, connection and exposure to the viewer’s body in the form of tactile experience and wearable sculpture, this book and the installation that it accompanies provide a physical lens through which to consider the challenges of reciprocity and the emotional experiences at that are at stake in a struggle for balance and mutuality in relationships.

Four Projects, K. Sarrantonio

Masters Theses

This thesis gives an overview of the author's inspirations and art practices and specifically surveys four projects that launched video projection work. The simple descriptions of the projects are accompanied by silkscreen prints taken from stills of the work.

Matriarchy, M. Camila Escobar Vélez

Masters Theses

This book collects my personal and artistic process since I got to the United States two years ago. My cultural and religious background is the foundation for my artistic explorations. This book collects theoretical references and personal stories that explore the impact of Catholicism on my personal life especially as a woman.

Haunt : Casual Surrealism, Cara Buzzell

Masters Theses

This thesis aims to define, observe and create a feeling of surrealism through a series of design gestures. The process began with a question: If I, as a designer, immerse myself in a subculture that I have no interest in, will I become a fan of it? To attempt this, I created systems and tools to deeply investigate each subculture. I observed and recorded what I experienced. As a case study, the haunted attraction community captured my attention. I went to their conventions and took classes in the crafts of “the haunt.” While immersed in this community, I started to …

Field Guide : Collected Studies Of A Symbiont, Jennifer Livermore

Masters Theses

Field Guide is a collection of studies that explore how symbiosis relates to graphic design. These studies investigate how visual language constructs — and is constructed by — ideas about nature.

As a manipulator of language and imagery, I borrow the ecologist’s methods in order to make sense of our relationship with the natural world. My techniques include observation, collection, mutation, framing and recombination. I use these methods not to celebrate them, but to expose their subjective nature.

I approach visual language, technology, and our ecological home as an entangled set of ideas rather than estranged categories. My work investigates …

This Is Public Work, Nick Adam

Masters Theses

This thesis positions graphic design as an integral form of public works.

T his is public work regards the causal relationship between graphic design and its publics as an opportunity to explore the formal maneuvers to enhance an artifact's visual codes. The idea is an experiential one: rich and meaningful form can lead to rich and meaningful experiences.

The designed artifacts of our world function across informational (effect) and emotional (affect) modes. The complexity of these operations take on an infrastructural role — what we see day-to-day shapes our experiences and understanding. The opportunity of a designer to practice in …

Monument For Feeling : Notes From The Archivist, Melissa Weiss

Masters Theses

I’ve always loved the conjunctions unless, yet, however, although. Grammatical interventions, they subvert all things certain, rational, and indisputable, opening a series of syntactic doorways into new, undetermined possibilities.

The pieces in the Institute fo? Contempo?a?y Inqui?y’s archive function like those conjunctions. They refuse and destabilize easy categorization, pointing, like a rhizome, toward a thousand different possible pasts — and just as many futures.

To be clear, the Institute fo? Contempo?a?y Inqui?y does not have a physical site. It is a network of psychic locations materialized through its archive. It is, in other words, what I have gathered.

I have …

Constellations, Maria Rull Bescós

Masters Theses

In this book you will find a collection of projects that both reflect and simultaneously reinvent my personal way of seeing the world, which I consider to be a space that is complex, diverse, and in continuous transformation.

Graphic design is the lens through which I examine and understand this complexity, and it is also the medium through which I translate this huge realm into navigable systems of ideas, tales, forms, and experiences.

I have been inspired to produce my own systems in response to those I discover through actively observing my environment (territory), reflecting upon my personal background (origin), …

Anachropomorphism!, Carson Evans

Masters Theses

Folks, the Truth is hard to know—if can be known at all.¹ Conventional Western wisdom tells us: stick to the facts. (I’m looking at you, Enlightenment.) We privilege the written word as an objective and reliable vehicle for communication. Useful, yes, but we over-rely. I counter with this: bodily performativity and purposeful inaccuracy that produces, paradoxically, narrative accuracy. These methods roil in our gut or tug at our heartstrings—instead of recoiling, we should embrace them.

I like to unpack “the stories we tell ourselves,”² our personal and societal mythologies, with a particular eye to how the past plays a role …

Curious Things, Allison Davis

Masters Theses

Curiosity fuels progress. It is what pushes us forward individually, as well as collectively. It allows us to make sense of the world and those that are in it. The problem is, we are in the midst of a curiosity crisis whereby our sensitivity to the physical has drastically diminished. Curious Things sheds light on our detachment from our surroundings and explores how ‘embodied curiosity’ can foster our need to know, experience, and explore. Through curious observations and unexpected encounters captured by others, this thesis argues that the use of distinct object forms and visual aesthetics can be viable solutions …

Letsqube, Biniam Assegid Kebede

Masters Theses

Letsqube is a platform that enables groups of friends to easily collect and pool money towards communal events, gatherings, and purchases.

Individuals find their friends on Letsqube and then agree on a budget for an event, gathering, or group purchase. Letsqube handles the finances by automatically debiting a set amount from a user’s bank account on a predetermined schedule.

Letsqube encourages people to get together, provides accountability and a schedule for contributions, and handles the finances in the background so that groups of friends can focus on enjoying their time together.

Making time to get together with friends regularly is …

Autonomous Vehicle Futures : Designing Experiences That Enable Trust And Adoption, Jeremy Bass

Masters Theses

This thesis is an investigation of the user experience design necessary for a fully autonomous vehicle that would enable trust and adoption of autonomous vehicle-based services. Autonomous vehicles are destined to revolutionize mobility, yet few companies are focusing on how people will best use these new autonomous-based services. This thesis used various forms of user testing to understand user’s expectations and hesitations for riding in an autonomous vehicle. These tests included improv workshops, surveys, interviews and a simulated autonomous vehicle service ride-along. Research revealed that user’s primary concerns were travel time, comfort (spatial and privacy) and personal safety. These concerns …

Summer Peaches And Salt-Tinged Fog, Carolina Jiménez

Masters Theses

The pieces that I create are monuments of the mundane; they are both garments and--through their installation--a place as well. They are portraits of loved people, embodied through hand labor and industrial processes. In this project I destabilize the idea of a memory palace--an imagined rational space which holds memory--and replace it with an ever-expanding memory atmosphere. From a palace of marble and bronze to a fog of salt tinged color, a sky turning, like a cut plum, from orange to purple, music carried on the breeze.

I map individuals, qualities of light, flashes of color and material. Specific moments …

The Evolution Of Ornament, Charlotte Ngaio Fairless

Masters Theses

The Evolution of Ornament is a visual exploration of Darwin’s theory of sexual selection, abstracted into three textile panels representing the allure of textural ornamentation. The fragmented shapes depicted are gathered together into asymmetrical layouts that reference dissection and bird plumage. The parallel themes of glamour in the natural world, and the pulsing vivacity of flora and fauna, emerge as a vehicle for the contemplation of the innate irrationality of desire. The viewer is seduced through neon color palettes, tactile materiality, and considered placement of specifically amorphous shapes. They are intended to simulate in the viewer the reaction of a …

Idiosyncratic Uniform, Erica Efstratoudakis

Masters Theses

Clothing mediates between the individual and the social. It creates a dialogue between our inner selves and our environments, a dialogue that becomes especially fraught for women at work. Focusing on women’s workwear in male-dominated fields, this thesis calls attention to the existing cultural norms in work environments that solidify dated gender expectations and biases. It suggests that the fashion industry has not adequately addressed the sartorial and emotional needs of everyday working women, and intervenes by placing wearers at the center of the design process. By applying needs-driven solutions and user research to a psychologically powerful force like fashion, …

Haptic Wonder : The Sensation Of Exquisite Craft, Anjuli Berstein

Masters Theses

I reinterpret traditional woven techniques to create permeable handcrafted screens, by using archival research of historical passementerie and gauze structures. Conceptually, these textiles are an exploration of how wonder can be reached through exquisite craft, a result of valuable raw materials combined with fine hand manipulation. I attempt to distinguish a kind of wonder that exists as a tactile sensation based on haptic sight of minutia, versus the sublime as an experience of optical sight of distant objects.

Wild Power, Iris Han

Masters Theses

Wild Power is a journey to understand myself by creating wearable pieces representing aspects of my character. A human body is limited physically and it cannot show the whole identity of a person. I have desired to empower myself and also express my complex innermost feelings by ornamenting my body with another layer. This aspiration has motivated me to make wearable objects with diverse and different qualities of beauty. Especially, I have thought for a long time about how fashion can strengthen a women’s power living under societal standards that treats gender differently. From this interest, my artwork naturally reflects …

Biovice: A Survival Tool Company, Chubai Liu

Masters Theses

This fictional dystopian society is the background of my work: In the year 2057, Earth’s environment has been deeply polluted, humanity has come to rely on external survival tools to live. BioVice as one of the largest bioengineering company in the world, committing themselves to the production of the most advanced survival tools.

There are two production lines in the BioVice Company. One is the economy line which targets the majority, especially the middle class; while the luxury line targets the wealthy and the elite. The designs of both production lines have futuristic appearances, combining forms from clinical devices and …

For All That Has Gone With The Train, Yueying Wang, Special Collections, Fleet Library

5th Baker & Whitehill Student Artists' Book Contest 2019

No abstract provided.

Cartesian Circle, Travis Morehead, Special Collections, Fleet Library

5th Baker & Whitehill Student Artists' Book Contest 2019

No abstract provided.

Untitled, Yujiang Wu, Special Collections, Fleet Library

5th Baker & Whitehill Student Artists' Book Contest 2019

$375 AMERICAN PRINTING HISTORY ASSOCIATION PURCHASE PRIZE AWARD

122 Brook To 41 Sheldon, Elena Foraker, Special Collections, Fleet Library

5th Baker & Whitehill Student Artists' Book Contest 2019

No abstract provided.

16 To 6, Xubai Li, Special Collections, Fleet Library

5th Baker & Whitehill Student Artists' Book Contest 2019

No abstract provided.

Second Circuit Daca Amicus Brief, Rhode Island School Of Design

Advocacy | Amicus Briefs + Comments

No abstract provided.

Unbound 2018 Program, Risd Unbound, Fleet Library, Olivia De Salve Villedieu

2018 Print

No abstract provided.

Unbound 2018 Program, Risd Unbound, Fleet Library, Olivia De Salve Villedieu

2018 Print

No abstract provided.

Unbound 2018 Exhibitor Biographies + Collection Descriptions, Risd Unbound, Fleet Library

2018 Print

No abstract provided.

Unbound 2018 Exhibitor Faqs, Risd Unbound, Fleet Library

2018 Print

No abstract provided.

Unbound 2018 Program, Risd Unbound, Fleet Library, Olivia De Salve Villedieu

2018 Print

No abstract provided.

Manual / Issue 10 / Polychrome, Sarah Ganz Blythe, Editor-In-Chief, Amy Pickworth, Editor, David Batchelor, Gina Borromeo, Nicole Buchanan, Catherine Cooper, Darby English, Mara L. Hermano, Elon Cook Lee, Josephine Lee, Dominic Molon, Maureen C. O'Brien, Risd Museum 2017 Summer Teen Intensive Students, Elizabeth A. Williams

Journals

Manual, a journal about art and its making. Polychrome. "In art, especially, polychrome invites us to the dialogue that colors are always having amongst themselves. A history of polychrome could be a series of poems exchanged among colors. The exchange might exhibit something like perpetual newness, again and again revealing differently bent hues and movingly novel blends. It would be a short-line poetry, excruciatingly sensitive to tone. Its speakers would have no names, so it would confuse the psychology of human orientation. In this connection, a warning against rendering polychrome as a pure positive seems in order: the parties to …