Art and Design Commons^™

Textile Tectonics: Weaving Memory, Body, And Belonging, Jennifer Stageberg

Masters Theses

This work delves into the idea of home as a sensory experience. Separating the feeling of home from the physical space of the house I aim to create new spaces that give the occupant autonomy and foster intimate connections with the material of the architecture. This is done with the hope of creating homes more attuned to the human body that provide a sense of belonging.

I propose repositioning the home as an intermediary space between our bodies and our surroundings. Approaching it through the lens of textiles to explore the sensory experience a home could provide. A series of …

Through You I Will Feel, Mitchell L. Poon

Masters Theses

Through You I Will Feel is an installation exploring my family’s archive and my relationship with my ancestral heritage. An abstracted simulation of my childhood home’s dining room, it examines how revisiting the family archive can reveal new information not only about the past, but also about the present and the future. The installation consists of five works which integrate printmaking and print-adjacent processes: a set of four lithographic prints, cyanotype and natural toning on fabric, inkjet-printing on shrink plastic, UV dye-printing on polymer clay tiles, and digitally printed wallpaper.

The written thesis is a culmination of my time at …

Human After All, Ritu Mantri

Masters Theses

human

0. a being, relating to, or belonging to a person or to people.

1. an organism whose behaviour is structured by survival, instinct, and the immediate conditions of its environment.

2. a primate capable of thinking in abstractions. It makes marks, builds tools, and uses language to reflect on itself and the world around it.

3. a maker that increasingly constructs systems as a mirror of itself to store memory, meaning, and perception beyond the limits of its body.

4. an entity whose intelligence is increasingly indistinguishable from the tools and technological infrastructures it has built.

5. a superhuman …

Finding The Estuary, Rhea Hu

Masters Theses

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Specific Randomness, Xinyi Li

Masters Theses

Stability is not a default. It must be actively produced.

My work grows out of precarity. Everything around me is a running process, but nothing is guaranteed. This thesis is about how to keep form going under that condition. My argument is that pattern is the key: not as decoration, but as an information system that lets the effort of sustained construction be seen, while keeping its logic from being fully read.

I use computational tools to apply rules to source images. The condition of these source images is that multiple constrained processes are running at once, each following its …

Menstrual Muses: Art, Storytelling, And The Care-Based Communication Of Menstrual Justice, Burcu Koleli

Masters Theses

Menstrual Muses is an artistic research project comprising a written thesis and a body of work developed across soft sculpture, ceramics, illustration, graphic memoir, digital media, and participatory workshops. The written component operates alongside the studio practice, outlining the project’s theoretical framework, methodology, and context while engaging questions of communication, accessibility, embodiment, and stigma. It situates menstruation within feminist discourse, examining how it has been culturally silenced, regulated, and shaped through systems of power.

The artistic work functions as research materialized through practice, responding to the central question of how my art can facilitate conversations around menstrual justice. It explores …

Where Each Step Lands: Reconnecting And Reparenting Through Visual Narrative, Skye Wang

Masters Theses

This research begins with lived experiences of dissociation and a persistent sense of disconnection between body and consciousness. It explores the potential of visual narrative as an embodied practice. Through daily walking and sketching, bodily sensations are translated into visual language through a synesthetic process, forming the foundation for a picture book as the central outcome of this project.

The picture book adopts the perspective of a jumping spider positioned beneath a five-year-old girl’s shoe, creating a shifting, downward-facing viewpoint. The spider functions as a viewing position, while the girl represents the inner child. The narrative is constructed around the …

Open_______, Eitan Boiarsky

Masters Theses

This thesis examines how ambiguity can function as a deliberate design strategy rather than a condition to eliminate. While modern design traditions have prioritized clarity, efficiency, and immediate legibility, this work revisits Umberto Eco's concept of the Open Work and Oskar Hansen's Open Form to argue that openness is not a failure of design but a method within it.

Through a series of workshops and object-based experiments, ambiguity is structured as a design instrument that invites interpretation rather than delivering fixed meaning. Participants encounter unfamiliar forms with deliberately withheld information, producing moments of hesitation, speculation, and reinterpretation. These encounters demonstrate …

Waterway: A Steam-Based Therapeutic Device System, Mingyuan Dong

Masters Theses

Across history and global cultures, water has played a central and often spiritual role in practices of care, from cleansing rituals to saunas and steam therapies. Yet, within contemporary product design, water is typically treated as a utility rather than as an experiential material capable of shaping perception, attention, and well-being. This thesis, Waterway, investigates how water, specifically in its steam state, can be designed as both a therapeutic medium and a ritualized experience that engages the body and mind.

Waterway proposes a steam-based wellness system that addresses physical pain and somatic discomfort while cultivating slower, more attentive interaction. Rather …

Made In Chimerica, Austin Wang

Masters Theses

This thesis seeks to answer how prop design may function as an effective vehicle to challenge notions of orientalism, an inquiry grounded for the purposes of this thesis in contemporary Asian diasporic experiences within the United States, and spark deeper questions regarding notions of assimilation, erasure, and cultural ownership. Cultural understanding of Asian American experiences have long been tethered by White-dominant frameworks to orientalist stereotypes that range from early xenophobic caricatures to more modern dehumanization attempts via techno orientalism and model minority myths. At its fundamental core, orientalism centralizes White-dominant narratives as the major filter by which to judge, interpret, …

An Anxious Artist's Guide To Magic, Mot Tuman

Masters Theses

Illustration’s essence is using some type of media to tell a story. This could be anything from sculpture, watercolor, even just text alone. Beyond its medium, I have been thinking for a while of illustration and storytelling as a type of illusory magic. Magic, according to the Oxford language dictionary as being "The power of using supernatural or other unseen forces to apparently influence events or human behaviour." It gives us the power to reach inside the mind and heart of a person and change their emotional and mental state. It's the ability to create a world and have others …

Archives Of The Future, Ka Oskar Ly

Masters Theses

Archives Of The Future is a practice-based thesis that invokes the archive and the future as simultaneous.

This research insists on the recentering of HMong Indigeneity and its own rooted traditions of HMong Queerness and HMong Feminism as ancestral knowledge systems.

They are the medicine. To recover their cosmological capacity is to traverse centuries of systematic eradication by empires and patriarchy.

I treat artistic making, community encounter, memory, and materials as equally valid ways of knowing and as collaborators. Field research from 2020 to 2026 moves through kinship and artisan teachings. It spans Southeast Asia, France, the United States, and …

Love In Passing Time, Elysa T. Adams

Masters Theses

Elysa Adams, 2026

Love in Passing Time reflects on how the Black church has molded my understanding of faith, family, and community. Working across relief, screenprint, sculpture, and sound, my practice explores how knowledge is shared across generations through music, tradition, and adornment.

The exhibition draws on my upbringing as a pastor’s child, in which the church serves as both a spiritual and communal home. These experiences appear through sculptural paper garments based on childhood memories, tambourines featuring the faces of people who have impacted my life, carved portraits of my grandparents, and sculptural pews that reference the architecture of …

Jewelry As A Portable Sanctuary, Yuhao Li

Masters Theses

This thesis examines how individuals remain intact in the presence of emotional difficulty. Rather than treating protection as withdrawal, the research proposes that stability emerges through the construction of an interior structure capable of holding vulnerability without collapse. Drawing on psychological theory, philosophy, and spatial thinking, it frames emotional repair as a spatial condition: an interior that can contain experience and be returned to when external conditions become unstable.
Within this framework, jewelry is redefined as a material extension of this interior. Positioned between body and world, it operates as a structure of containment, functioning as a portable …

Sentience, Sheetal Agrawal

Masters Theses

The increasing urgency for sustainable and adaptive systems has driven research toward embedding intelligence directly into materials rather than relying solely on external sensing and control systems. This thesis explores how smart material1 embedded systems can be designed to recognize and respond to environmental signatures, defined as measurable patterns such as temperature fluctuations and mechanical forces. Central to this investigation is the integration of shape memory alloys, particularly Nitinol, with geometry-based actuation mechanisms that amplify material behavior into functional system responses.

The central argument is that designing with smart materials is a design problem, not primarily a materials science problem …

Objects With Life, Yu Ting Chiu

Masters Theses

Our everyday environments are filled with functional objects that remain emotionally and perceptually invisible until they are needed. For those who experience fragmented attention, a trait central to , static objects frequently vanish from awareness once outside our focus. But what if static objects were no longer passive tools, and instead active participants in our domestic environments?

Inspired by this inquiry, my work animates the inanimate, using a lamp as a medium to investigate how motion can transform utility into a perceptive companion. Through this exploration, I examine the potential for a new behavioral interaction between humans and their belongings, …

Love Letters To Insects: Affect-Based Science Communication, Manuela Guzmán

Masters Theses

Love Letters to Insects is a series of artists’ books that, mimicking a scientific insect collection, asks how visual narrative can shape and reframe our relationship to our environment.

Delving into the historical construction of the nature-culture divide, my thesis considers how colonial history has shaped modes of representation in Latin America that distance, objectify, and “other” living beings. Engaging with science, history, philosophy, and decolonial and Indigenous perspectives, as well as the work of comic artists and theorists, I think about the way I learned to interact with my environment and find in visual storytelling a place to challenge …

Gray Sheep, Jennifer Richie

Masters Theses

When material comforts are not available or accessible, how can we care for one another with what is available? Can these methods be scaled up? How can we emulate the tight cultural bonds of people who relied on each other due to their isolation from cultural centers (like towns and cities)? Is it possible to be self-sufficient and not wealthy in the 21st century or has this ability died with past generations?

Using only scraps, found and discarded materials, and items from RISD’s Loop Lab and Second Life, I explore the skills and engineering that would have been a necessary …

Perceptual Heterotopia: A Spatial Experience Through Light, Media, And Textiles, Anne Yeoji Kim

Masters Theses

This study originates from sensory experience of observing sunrises and sunsets. Although the space in which these phenomena occur remains constant, it is perceived in different ways due to changes in the light that enters the space at these times. From these sensory experiences, the study began to inquire into the relationship between reality and the ideal. From this inquiry, it evolved into an exploration of how the ideal, or utopian, could be experienced through the senses within the realm of reality.

The concept of a heterotopia, as proposed by Michel Foucault, was used to expand upon these issues. A …

Material Costs, Karima Weinman

Masters Theses

This thesis investigates how migration fatality and disappearance data can be reinterpreted through material craft to create a more reflective encounter with information. Working with the Missing Migrants Project's dataset, this project asks how design can communicate dimensions of human loss that conventional data visualization cannot reach.

The work situates contemporary border violence within a longer colonial history, arguing that the logics of surveillance and quantification that structured European imperial expansion persist in the databases that govern mobility in the Mediterranean today.

Terrazzo is a 15th-century Venetian flooring technique built from discarded fragments bound together into a unified surface. This …

Where Forms Dream, Siran Liu

Masters Theses

What does it mean to dream?

There is a passages from Daoist classic ‘Zhuangzi’, attributed to the philosopher Zhuang Zhou: The “Butterfly Dream”:

Once Zhuang Zhou dreamt he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn't know he was Zhuang Zhou. Suddenly, he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Zhuang Zhou. But he didn't know if he was Zhuang Zhou who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuang Zhou

In this story, the dream becomes a state that destabilizes certainty. …

Open Forms, Barbara Cutlak

Masters Theses

Open Forms

Architecture always exists in relation to the context in which it stands. There is no way, however, to anticipate how the constructed space will be inhabited, or transformed by the surroundings — and so, it remains open to discovery and change. Graphic design form can operate in a similar way: opening itself to a context by offering multiple ways of seeing, interacting and being performed.

Drawing from the contexts that have informed my practice — my training in architecture and the artistic movements of Brazil, my home country — Open Forms experiments with how to translate these spatial …

Just Between Us (And Everyone We Tell...), Deborah Khodanovich

Masters Theses

Graphic designers are often obsessed with a broader public. The desire to be seen, to be heard, to have our work reach the broadest audience possible—these are goals deeply ingrained in our discipline. But why? Just Between Us (and everyone we tell…) challenges us to abandon this fixation, proposing instead that graphic design should concern itself with the private—the intimate, the local, the unseen.

This is where gossip comes in. Gossip is the language of the invisible, a form of sharing, and a means of knowledge-production and preservation that has historically been dismissed as frivolous, immoral, and—most egregious of all—associated …

Between Seeing And Knowing, Pavol Roskovensky

Masters Theses

Abstract

For me, painting often begins with an experience of the world that cannot immediately be explained. As a child in Slovakia during the Velvet Revolution, I saw a flag disappear from the town square and a new one take its place. What changed was color and proportion; but the feeling of the space and my relation to it changed completely. That moment has stayed with me because it revealed something I continue to believe: before language, before explanation, visual form has the power to move us.

In my practice, I approach painting as a site of perception, discovery, and …

The Maroon Cycle, Lloyd-Princeton Cangé

Masters Theses

The key element that ties most of the major franchises together, whether the IP is a YA series or a videogame is the epic story or epic poem. From The Iliad and the Odyssey to Dragonball and Demon Slayer, the epic is a wellspring of endless iteration. Here, language does not merely buttress and support the work, as is often the case in contemporary art, but language is the narrative, the direct source material. The epic poem that is The Maroon Cycle will consist of both prose stanzas and images in the form of paintings, drawings, collages, prints, and photographs. …

If The Sun Were As Big As My Heart, What Would Be The Distance Between The Sun And The Earth? Or How To Domesticate The Sun, Catalina Martinez, Catalina Martinez Rojas

Masters Theses

If the Sun were as big as my heart, what would be the distance between the Sun and the Earth? Or how to domesticate the Sun is a multidisciplinary installation project that explores how emotional, spiritual, and perceptual experiences can be translated into material form. Beginning from a speculative mathematical proposition that reduces the scale of the Sun to the size of the artist’s heart, the project investigates distance not only as a physical condition, but also as an emotional and domestic one.

Drawing from Colombian vallenato traditions, everyday observations of sunlight, and references ranging from Agnes Martin and Wayne …

This Body Held Others, Mia I. Pons

LSU Master's Theses

The exhibition this body held others examines the body's invisible depths, the unseen, and its interpersonal memories. These ideas are explored through printmaking, book arts, and papermaking, with a focus on their connection and response to the materiality and nature of the body. Through the examination of my personal archive this work explores the collection, reconstruction, and recycling of imagery. The exhibition explores an unfolding story that examines how the ephemeral and corporeal survival and legacy of self and maternal lineage. These ideas are explored through the exhibitions three sections; emergence, body merger / departure, and the return. The attention …

Modern Visual Solutions For Established Brands: Making Graphic Design Accessible To Legacy Businesses, Emma R. Shanton

Masters Theses

Legacy businesses, often family-owned shops or companies that have been around for decades, have real history and loyal customers, but many look old-fashioned and struggle to attract new people today. Outdated logos, hard-to-read designs, and the habit of using ready-made templates or AI-generated images lead to branding that feels generic, turns customers away, excludes people with disabilities, and can even cause legal trouble.

This study asks a simple question: How can small, long-running businesses update their look in a way that is affordable, easy for everyone to use, legally safe, and still feels true to their story, without high costs, …

From Classroom To Conference: A Branding Toolkit For Educators, Danyel Burgett

Masters Theses

From Classroom to Conference: Branding the Educator investigates how design methodology and research-based instructional frameworks can support educators in developing cohesive professional identities. As educators are increasingly expected to present, publish, and maintain digital presences, formal preparation in visual communication and professional branding remains limited within teacher preparation and professional development. This thesis addresses that gap through the development of an instructional design solution. Grounded in John Hattie’s Visible Learning framework, adult learning theory, and Kolb’s Experiential Learning Cycle, the project applies principles of clarity, reflection, feedback, metacognition, and experiential learning to professional identity development. The resulting design solution includes …

Artrepreneurs & Business Survival: Bridging The Gap To Creative Success, Ryan Michael Moore

Masters Theses

Artrepreneurs — freelance artists and small studio owners within creative industries — frequently lack training in essential business management skills in financial management, client pipeline development, and business sustainability. These factors exacerbate already statistically high business failure rates, adding to the burdens experienced by creative entrepreneurs. Conventional wisdom and guidance for entrepreneurs is found in experience-based advice from books, blogs and business mentors. While these offer valuable insights, the lack of data-driven advice highlights an opportunity to close the knowledge gap. This research investigates visually engaging educational systems to guide the creation of new visual solutions which address these challenges. …