Industrial and Product Design Commons^™

Rooted In Embodied Making: A Notebook On Process, Vija Lietuvninkas

Masters Theses

This thesis takes the form of a wooden box containing an archive of fragments – scanned notebooks, sketches, photographs, emails, journal entries, and other materials – that trace a year of embodied, process-based inquiry. Rather than presenting a linear argument or a polished final product, the work reflects a nonlinear, exploratory methodology grounded in making, wandering, and self-reflection.

Born within the context of the 2025 Sustainability Design Lab, an interdisciplinary initiative at RISD examining the material culture of wood across design fields, this project documents the artist’s evolving engagement with green wood as both material and metaphor. Through practices such …

While We Were At Dinner, Anna Glass

Masters Theses

Mealtime is globally recognized as a time to gather, as food catalyzes connection. This project delves into this human practice of commensality and both explores and emphasizes the significance of communal eating and its benefits through designed objects. Through a collection of six designed dining experiments, this study examines the role of novel tabletop objects and unusually curated meal environments. The way these experiments are designed highlights how communal mealtime experiences can be used as tools for social engagement and disruptors of cultural norms.

Furniture and tableware designs have the power to challenge the assumed arrangement of traditional mealtime rituals, …

Breaking | Grounding | Growing: Expanding The Rhode Island Gardening Reentry Programs As A Pathway Towards Stability, Juliana Soltys

Masters Theses

What happens to the over two million people incarcerated in U.S. prisons and jails?

Changing in sentencing laws and policies have created a cycle of imprisonment, racially isolating and oppressing BIPOC communities. Reintegration and reentry programs are an avenue to break the cycle of recidivism. Through my work, I have developed hands-on, structured opportunities for justice-involved adults to rebuild a life for themselves by increasing the accessibility of gardening reentry programs. This project creates a space for mentorship and support for Rhode Island’s formerly incarcerated people with the goal of helping them to develop vital life skills through growing and …

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 …

Neighborhood Socials In South Philadelphia, Cambria Graham, Khadijah Pearson, Tytisha Harris

Nexus Maximus

Our project focuses on the lack of community in the South Philadelphia area and the high crime rates that are a result of this. We propose a monthly social event to be hosted at the parks and rec centers that are being revitalized by the state. We will start a sponsorship with Amazon who now owns Whole Foods as well as Aldi’s to promote healthy eating as well as provide food for the events.

Nexus Maximus V

The 2018 Challenge: "Improving Lives Through Healthy Communities" Teams will evaluate and seek innovation that supports the health and well-being of specific local …

Success In The Streets Of Kensington, Melanie Perkins, Lindsay Wratcher, Halie Finke, Friederike Stock

Nexus Maximus

The third day of Nexus Maximus was spent working on our poster and getting our final ideas together to present the pitch to our audience. We all worked side by side in one of the DEC classrooms working on putting our thoughts into bullet points and developing the graphics for the board. My group member and I went to the poster workshop and got inspired to create the board layout. We wanted to keep the board as simple as possible with easy to read graphics and bullet points so that the viewer could easily follow our process and understand what …

Philagreen: "Buy Green. Give Green. Live Green", Irene Cooper, Will Bender, Victor Wright, Chelsea Nwanne, Vannessa Njoo

Nexus Maximus

We will use green roofs to reduce levels of air pollution in Philadelphia, while simultaneously working to improve the lives of low-income Philadelphians through the donation of a green roof. Our program “Live One. Give One.” prices property owners based on yearly income

Nexus Maximus V

The 2018 Challenge: "Improving Lives Through Healthy Communities" Teams will evaluate and seek innovation that supports the health and well-being of specific local community populations. The team’s project work will be supplemented with workshops on innovation, entrepreneurship, and content relevant to the theme, delivered by experts throughout the weekend.

Teams will also explore opportunities …

Our Future Selves

SIGNED: The Magazine of The Hong Kong Design Institute

In 2009, Dr. Yanki Lee initiated a series of projects to challenge the concept of ageing as a problem to be solved, choosing instead to cast the ageing process as unique experience for each individual and a culture from which design lessons can be drawn. Her research is leading to a series of innovative design projects that will benefit all segments of the community.