Art and Design Commons^™

Creative Connections: Building Empathy To Foster Ecoliteracy Through Art Education, Jocelyn Salim

Masters Theses

This thesis investigates the potential positive impact of fostering empathy and understanding for the natural world through art education. Through action research, this study examines various teaching approaches, such as incorporating scientific knowledge, employing literature to discuss ecological themes, and engaging in participatory storytelling activities to cultivate empathy among elementary school children. The objective of this thesis is to explore empathy as a potential pathway to encourage children to foster connections with the natural world and develop compassionate traits, attitudes, and behaviors towards nature as they grow. The findings of this study reveal that children exhibit high levels of enthusiasm …

Virtual Bodies: Probing Fake Flesh, Emily Elhoffer

MFA in Visual Art

This thesis explores the fluid and often elusive concept of the body as mediated through technology and art, questioning the boundaries between the physical and virtual. By investigating the interactions of cultural ideals, technological mediation, and material experimentation, the research delves into how contemporary art practices can challenge and expand our understanding of embodiment.

Central to this exploration is the use of varied mediums such as sculpture, digital imagery, and installation art to create what I term "virtual bodies"—conceptual entities that exist at the intersection of imagination and material reality. These creations often reflect and critique societal norms regarding beauty, …

Playing To Grow. Roundtable Interview On Games, Education, And Character, Owen Gottlieb, Matthew Farber, Paul Darvasi

Articles

In this roundtable interview moderated by Paul Darvasi, lecturer at the University of Toronto and co-founder of Gold Bug Interactive, Owen Gottlieb and Matthew Farber discuss research and practice at the intersection of religion, character education, and games in schools. Gottlieb is an associate professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology, founder and lead faculty at the Initiative in Religion, Culture, and Policy at the MAGIC center, and founder and director of the Interaction, Media, and Learning Lab at RIT, where he specializes in interactive media, learning, religion, and culture. Farber is an associate professor of educational technology and coordinator …

More Than Human Empathy: A Caring Approach To Ecosystemic Design, Mariana Pestana

IASDR Conference Series

This paper argues for a caring approach to design based on more-than-human empathy. It proposes that such an empathic turn can provide a useful framework for eco-systemic thinking and practice in design, because it takes into consideration the wellbeing and the rights of people but also that of non-human bodies. To do that, this paper reports on a study concerning the conception and delivery of a design Biennial, entirely created and experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic, which gathered thinkers, practitioners, researchers and community groups to collectively discuss, scrutinise and rehearse the role of design in a post-anthropocentric, more-than-human paradigm. For …

Mfa Master Project, Owen Pierce

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

I am a storyteller.

I just happen to paint, draw and sculpt my stories more often than I write them. Thematically, I gravitate towards stories that speak about ecological and humanitarian concerns. Fantasy illustration is where I can create with the greatest freedom and indulge my love of crafting stories, and also as a form of escapism. As the author

Ursula K. Le Guin quotes, “If the direction of escape is towards freedom, what then is ‘escapism’ an accusation of?” Long running series of programs, films and books attest to this desire to be engaged at a deeper, more meaningful …

People Eater, Lilas Verrill

Honors College

Monsters have persisted in literature throughout human culture serving the role as the living embodiment of our greatest fears. Based on that definition, we should have no reason to want to offer them our sympathy, our understanding, our love, yet we see them written with depth, complexity, even humanity, time and time again. The monster is more than just what scares us. They can be difficult to understand - foreign and strange, but if we take the time to look a little deeper, we may find part of ourselves staring back. This thesis explores the role the “monster” plays as …

Design Placebos For The Impossibility Of Empathy In Videotelephony, Nesli Hazal Oktay

DRS Biennial Conference Series

This year, humans were locked in their homes with a rising need for digital communication such as videotelephony. Although videotelephony helps to reduce the physical gap, it leaves little room for the transmission of body language that is usually associated with empathy. This research is inspired by the cognitive model of empathy which can be explained as our desire to understand others’ emotions and interact with them accordingly. By creating a reflective experience of imagining through the body in movement, the research looks into what inter-action design’s role be in working with empathy and asks: In which ways design placebos …

Sanctuary: The-Construction Of Communion, Carlos Salazar-Lermont

MFA in Visual Art

This thesis narrates the development of the multimedia art installation called Sanctuary. I unwrap the theoretical background of my practice, which is rooted in the theories of deconstruction by Jacques Derrida, and the rhizome theory by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. I approach my creative process as a grammatic of matter, space, and time, constructing meaning through an interplay of significants that connect to political, social, economic, and cultural implications. In the case of Sanctuary, I sought to create a path of empathy towards Venezuelan refugees in St. Louis, Missouri through the exploration of the concept of communion. …

Transformation., Jingshuo Yang

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

My works mainly show my perception of life and my change of thought. The world is full of changes, and the pandemic has disrupted our lives. Many people, including me, are confused about the world. Philosophy and my observation and thinking about the world helped me to have a clearer understanding of the world. My paintings Licia, Butterfly Woman, and Live with Covid reflect my understanding of German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer's theory of empathy. Within my art, I also use another German Philosopher Theodor W. Adorno's theory of the culture industry to deepen my understanding of some social phenomena. My …

Environmental Education In Protected Areas In Petrópolis, Rio De Janeiro: Children As Agents Of Empathy For And Engagement With The Cause Of Nature Conservation, Marianne Von Lachmann, Rita Maria De Souza Couto, Roberta Portas

Learn X Design Conference Series

This article presents examples of environmental education programs and events run in protected areas of Petrópolis, Rio de Janeiro state, Brazil, and a brief overview of novel findings in the histo-ry, sociology, anthropology, and geography of childhood, converging with those from the area of education, in which children’s agency in cultural production, the diversity of children’s cultures, and multiple childhoods are recognized. This article outlines the importance of continued efforts to take children from private and public schools, from kindergarten to high school, to engage in play-ful activities in preserved nature, as demonstrated in the initiatives described. When the full …

End Users In Students’ Participatory Design Process, Noora Bosch, Pirita Seitamaa-Hakkarainen, Tellervo Härkki

Learn X Design Conference Series

This exploratory case study aims to shed light on how end users were considered in students’ design discussions and final design products. A 3-month participatory design project for students (ages 14–15) was designed, with the design brief: “co-design and make an e-textile product for the preschoolers according to their wishes and needs”. We analyzed transcribed end-users-related design discussions and the final products of two teams. The findings indicate that students’ end-users-related design discussions concerned various functional, technical, and visual/aesthetic features, as well as aspects beyond functional, such as students’ memories and experiences. Additionally, many concrete and abstract features and solutions …

How This War Of Mine Creates Empathy For Virtual Characters, Cole Pergerson

ART 108: Introduction to Games Studies

Is it possible to empathize with virtual characters? Are game characters just a means for game and story progress or can we develop a strong emotional connection with them? In this research essay, I analysis This War of Mine, a game about surviving a worn torn city where food is limited, and the player must make difficult moral decisions survive. The player controls a small group of characters who all need to be feed, get enough sleep, may need medical care, and other human needs. To look how This War of Mine creates empathy for the virtual characters, I will …

Empathy, Animals, And Deadly Vices, Kathie Jenni

Animal Studies Journal

In Deadly Vices, Gabriele Taylor provides a secular analysis of vices which in Christian theology were thought to bring death to the soul: sloth, envy, avarice, pride, anger, lust, and gluttony. She argues that these vices are appropriately singled out and grouped together in that ‘they are destructive of the self and prevent its flourishing’. Using a related approach, I offer a secular analysis of gluttony and cowardice, examining their roles in common failures to empathise with animals. I argue that these vices constitute serious moral failings, for they enable continuing complicity in animal abuse and undermine integrity. While Taylor …

Plein-Air Drawing And Embodied Vision: Hans Hofmann's Landscapes, 1928-1935, Anna H. Tome

Theses and Dissertations

Hans Hofmann (1888-1966) produced over one thousand black and white drawings during his early and mid-career before becoming known as a master of color and abstraction. This text examines landscape drawings made from 1928-1935 that evidence the role of nature, new perceptual theories, and embodied vision in his artistic development.

Ether: A Social Design, Zihan Zhou

Masters Theses

As an individual with an independent consciousness that cannot be shared, it is impossible to have complete empathy. But as a social animal, empathy is also the ability pursued by individuals and society collectively. Empathy is an indispensable element to also achieve social justice which benefits each individual.

The current media environment is usually that information is aggregated from the bottom to the top, and then transmitted from the top to each individual at the bottom through an announcement of information.

The biggest contradiction arising from this information mechanism is that humans who both send and receive information involuntarily pay …

Barren: A Case Study Using Art In Religious Instruction To Foster Empathy By Providing Deeper Insight And Encouraging Contemporary Dialogue, Esther Hi'ilani Candari

Masters Theses

This thesis draws upon a review of current literature related to the empathy-building potential of fine art and experiences of infertile women, especially those within Judeo-Christian communities, to build a case study for utilizing fine art to create stronger more empathetic communities. For this case study, the researcher utilized an online survey of infertile Judeo-Christian women to further clarify the specific needs of this minority group. Then she drew upon a broad array of current and historical literature and artwork to discern what cultural and theological trends may have framed infertility as a stigma. Using this information she then produced …

Spit In My Mouth: Queer Intimacies, Material Intra-Actions, And Sensuous Becoming, Gm Keaton

Theses and Dissertations

This document describes my multidisciplinary art practice as it intersects with New Materialism, Queer and Affect theory, Ecology, and my embodied and experiential knowledge as a queer subject. The writing is divided into two categories. One is more theoretical, thinking through these different discourses. The other realizes them through relationships and intra-actions between my material kin and me. With these two modes of writing,I propose that embodied and felt knowing is as valid and illuminating as more traditional forms of knowledge. These sections are interdependent and resist linear logic, offering relational meanings to each reader as they find their way …

Bone Meal, Johnathan Onyschuk

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

My research explores the material properties of gaming interfaces and the paranoiac virtual spaces of male fantasies. The first chapter of this thesis is an extended artist statement and a summary of influences in my work. Topics include the relationship between fantasy violence and real violence, digital avatars, and the limits of empathy in digital space. This chapter also contains documentation of works produced throughout the course of my MFA candidacy as well as the contexts and concepts behind those works. The second chapter is a case study exploring the work of artist Neo Rauch, whose paintings quietly critique and …

Altered States: Creative Arts, Virtual Reality, And The Human Condition, Sophia Gebara

Honors Theses

Virtual reality (VR) is a medium that is cutting-edge and novel, creating fully immersive experiences for diverse audiences. Able to fabricate endless opportunities of hyper-realistic scenes, virtual reality provides a specific kind of space for self-reflection and empathy that no other medium can match. VR can take the viewer to the night of the shooting of Trayvon Martin, or next to families trying to survive the genocide in the Nuba mountains of Sudan, or even alongside a NASA scientists atop a sheet of ice in Greenland measuring the rising sea levels. This thesis explores the discourse and critical commentary surrounding …

Breaking The Fourth Wall: Avenues For Empathy Through Participation And Interaction, Grace Zajdel

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

Abstract:

Theater is used as a lens through which I view the act of role play in participatory and interaction based artworks. I examine the elements of Action – in participatory or performance works—and Set—in immersive installation works – for their effectiveness in creating avenues for empathetic relations in my own work and that of contemporary artists. I distinguish between the overblown spectacle of Peter Brook’s Deadly Theater and connect the mission of the Holy Theater to that of my own art practice. Performance, immersive installation, participation and interaction thereby serve to allow the artwork’s participants to engage in role-taking …

Roses & Thorns, Stephanie Alaniz

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

This written thesis has been created alongside the thesis exhibition shown in the Laura Mesaros Gallery at West Virginia University (displayed March 18th to March 22nd). The work presented consisted of drawings, bookmaking, and various forms of printmaking and collage. This body of work is meant to create an analysis of insecurities and body positivity we associate with our physical selves. This work is a collective experience that has been a collaboration with over 80 participants. The number of participants help to create a larger overall collective voice. By creating this collective voice, we can experience these feelings together and …

Tracing Patterns: Making Sense Of Experience, Isabelle Davis

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

In my life, I have developed several practices in attempt to preserve my memories in a way that I can relive them, knowing exactly how I felt at the time. Two of these practices are the practice of frequently journaling, and the practice of keeping objects for their sentimental value. For my thesis, I used journal entries and sentimental objects as a starting point for creating a metaphor for how I process emotions in my life. I created a quilt out of 36 excerpts of journal entries from throughout college to symbolize the way it is comforting to me to …

(Fear Of) (An Exploration Of Empathy), Caroline Schmidt

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

How much can you understand what another person is feeling? How much can they understand what you feel? This is the territory that my capstone investigates. Utilizing a mixture of informal and formal language and experimental footnotes, I describe the concepts and process behind my most recent body of work, the (Fear Of) series of animations, and its relationship to empathy. I follow this discussion with an explanation of my choice of fears and eyes as vehicles for this project, and end with an appendix featuring a sample of the interview-based monologues and my notes on which the project was …

Design-Thinking, Making, And Innovating: Fresh Tools For The Physician's Toolbox, L. Albala, T. Bober, M. Mallozzi, L. Koeneke-Hernandez, B. Ku

Department of Emergency Medicine Faculty Papers

Medical school education should foster creativity by enabling students to become 'makers' who prototype and design. Healthcare professionals and students experience pain points on a daily basis, but are not given the tools, training, or opportunity to help solve them in new, potentially better ways. The student physician of the future will learn these skills through collaborative workshops and having dedicated 'innovation time.' This pre-clinical curriculum would incorporate skills centered on (1) Digital Technology and Small Electronics (DTSE), (2) Textiles and Medical Materials (TMM), and (3) Rapid Prototyping Technologies (RPT). Complemented by an on-campus makerspace, students will be able to …

A Personal Approach To Landscape: Empathy, Sentiment, And The Environment's Representation In Tumultuous Times, Lauren Hensens

Theses and Dissertations

My work approaches the multitude of personal experience within the landscape, considering its cultural representation, aiming to give the environment agency within these tumultuous times. The following text is a personal narrative, realizing the many lenses through which a landscape can be experienced, including analyses of artists, writers, and musicians who have represented landscape through their own individuality.

Empathic Experience Design For Cognitive Impairment, Leonardo Orea-Amador

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Empathic Experience Design (EED) is a technique that lets product designers empathize with their product users with the use of empathic experiences. These empathic experiences are activities that let designers become immersed in a simulation of the users' typical environment and conditions and gain powerful insights of the user's product experience. The simulation uses "tools" like earplugs and gloves that can simulate specific conditions such as hearing loss, or lack of sensitivity, for example. Literature shows that this empathic approach enables designers to discover unarticulated customer needs known as user latent needs. Latent needs produce significant benefits in the creation …

Embodiment Of Empathy: Experiencing Disease Through Design, Noha Fouad

Theses and Dissertations

Today, more than 400 million individuals around the world have diabetes. This number is expected to grow to more than 600 million by 2023. However, diabetes is more than just a statistic. It is an incurable, psychologically nuanced disease, with daily battles and far-reaching complications. The lives of those afflicted undergo permanent physical and psychological changes.

Reading the stories of diabetics, or hearing them share their experience may elicit an immediate yet often fleeting sense of realization. How, then, can this brief moment of awareness be prolonged? How can a non-diabetic feel diabetes? More importantly, why should they? This research …

Empathy And Moral Laziness, Kathie Jenni

Animal Studies Journal

In The Empathy Exams Leslie Jamison offers an unusual perspective: ‘Empathy isn’t just something that happens to us – a meteor shower of synapses firing across the brain – it’s also a choice we make: to pay attention, to extend ourselves. It’s made of exertion, that dowdier cousin of impulse’ (23). This essay is dedicated to elaborating that crucial observation. A vast amount of recent research concerns empathy – in evolutionary biology, neurobiology, moral psychology, and ethics. I want to extend these investigations by exploring the degree to which individuals can control our empathy: for whom and what we feel …

A Step Of Two Or The Pas De Deux, Molly A. Hoisington

Masters Theses

The second part of a two-part MFA Thesis presentation, this paper distills the content from the preceding exhibition A Step of Two or The Pas de Deux: an installation of paintings, drawings and projected video. It touches on various themes that surround [well researched] ideas about perception, dissociation, the gaze, and relationships. Most of all, this paper and the body of work it describes is about the visual representation of a sensual understanding of the world.

From Artefact Design To Service Design Thinking Innovations, Erica Ormsby

Theses : Honours

This research will explore the effect of the introduction of service design methods to graphic designers, and whether graphic designers are limited to the design of ephemeral artifacts or instead can play a significant role in the innovation of products and services among larger industry and community based projects in Perth, Western Australia, and perhaps even enrich service design processes themselves. This thesis will examine established graphic design disciplinary processes as well as alterations to those practices via the introduction of service design methods. In addition, these service design processes will also be applied to a complex live service orientated …