RGB11: RISD Grad Book 2011

R I S DG R A DB O O K2 0 1 1

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RGB 11

graduate student alliance executive board

Arianne Gelardin LDAR ’11, RISD Grad Book 2011 EditorJason Huff D+M ’11, PresidentScott MacDonald LDAR ’11, Vice PresidentDylan Greif GD ’12, Communications Director

editorial team

Graduate Student Alliance Executive BoardDiana Mangaser M.Arch ’12

Phoebe Stubbs Glass ’11

design team

Lindsay Kinkade GD ’10, Book Designer, Zine Workshop Facilitator

Mimi Cabell Photo ’11, Photographer

advisory board

Patricia C. Phillips, Dean of Graduate StudiesJennifer Liese, Director, risd Writing CenterBethany Johns, Graduate Program Director, Graphic DesignAmy Patenaude, Administrative Assistant, Graduate StudiesDon Morton, Director, Office of Student Life

© Copyright 2011, Rhode Island School of Design

Images of individual student work are courtesy of the artists and designers,

or, as noted, by Mimi Cabell. All graduate exhibition installation photos are

by David O'Connor, except that on page six, which is by Dimitry Tetin. Images

from the zine workshop are by Lindsay Kinkade.

RGB11 is typeset in Prensa, designed by Cyrus Highsmith, and Klavika, designed by Eric Olson.

Catalog printed by Signature Printers in East Providence, Rhode Island, on 80 lb. Lynx opaque white paper. Zines printed by Allegra Thayer Street on Wausau Astrobrights paper. Boxes constructed by The Custom Box Company.

RISD Grad Book 2011

RGB 11

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Editor’s Note

Not Necessarily and Not Forever ...

Go Back!

The Activist-Entrepreneur

Graduate Work

ARIANNE GELARDIN

PATRICIA C. PHILLIPS

NAOMI FRY

KELLER EASTERLING

Editor’s Note

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In 2010-2011, the Graduate Student Alliance

(gsa) at Rhode Island School of Design

appeared to be a group of overachieving, out-

spoken, highly organized, and efficient social

gluts who enjoyed fantasizing about the utopic

future of risd. Behind the scenes, however,

they were simply a group of graduate students

joined together by a shared concern for

the quality of their education. Their official

roles — President, Vice President, etc. — were

often extended to support one another’s tasks

as needed. This proved to be the key to their

success; no one ever felt abandoned in his or

her effort to engage the student body in open

studio events, to gather feedback on school-

wide issues, or to collect submissions for this

very publication.

Zine workshop ephemera.

Last September the GSA identified some difficulties with the Process Book, the precursor to this publication, the RISD Grad Book 2011 (RGB11). How can one book represent the attitude, the aesthetic, and the material process of so many students within and across 16 disciplines? Despite risd’s commendable reputation for teaching a heavily labored process of making, the Process Book was challenging in that students were hesitant to reveal work in its varying states of pre-maturity. Furthermore, to identify and declare cross-disciplinary groupings of process inevitably ran the risk of false or superficial categorization. How can we determine and organize patterns in thought, action, and object?

In reevaluating the process of the book itself, our team concluded that with all the energy required to fulfill the democratic intentions of this ambitious production—and in the midst of our own Master’s thesis projects—we needed a fleet of additional manpower. Lindsay Kinkade (gd ’10), who was selected to design the book, lives and breathes collaboration. Upon her initiative and in line with the goal of

How can one book represent the attitude, the aesthetic, and the material process of so many students within and across 16 disciplines?

21collective authorship, we developed a series of activities, workshops, and frameworks within which students could input the content of their choosing. Departmental zines were cut, pasted, and photocopied by the students themselves. Writing workshops and group-editing sessions were held to catalyze the submission of artist statements. Respected faculty were called upon to advise our design, content, and production strategies.

In determining how to organize our collected content into a cohesive book form, we scrutinized new and old publications for inspiration. Aspen magazine and Dave Eggers’s McSweeney’s offered examples where a range of articles and authors are represented in a trove of smaller booklets, posters, vinyl, and film reels. Marshall McLuhan’s Unbound and Stefan Sagmeister’s Things I have learned in my life so far suggested to us the serializing of collections of creative work. These models supported our belief that the RGB11 couldn’t be an individually authored book; it had to offer its participants the agency of choice. Thus, in these pages an exhibition catalog indexes the work of the Master’s theses, the culmination of two or three years of intensive focus, accompanied by written statements. The collection of raw and unedited department zines that is the other half of this boxed set further elicits the idiosyncrasies of its makers.

22 The RGB11 would not exist without the unwavering support of the Faculty Advisory Board: Patricia C. Phillips, Dean of Graduate Studies; Jennifer Liese, Writing Center Director; Bethany Johns, Graduate Program Director, Graphic Design. Don Morton, Office of Student Life Director, generously offered positive feedback and financial wisdom. Amy Patenaude, Administrative Assistant, Graduate Studies, was forever patient with our endless questions and requests.

The Editorial Team — Diana Mangaser (m.arch ’12), Phoebe Stubbs (glass ’11), and the gsa Executive Board—proved indispensable in the editing of 150+ artist statements. Mimi Cabell (photo ’11) was outstanding in her documentation of the risd 2011 Graduate Thesis Exhibition. Mark Moscone, Director of Exhibitions, is greatly appreciated for producing excellent public platforms for student work.

To complement the work of the 176 featured graduate students, we invited three well-seasoned individuals to write contributing essays for the exhibition catalog. Patricia C. Phillips’s essay, “Not Necessarily and Not Forever… ,” bridges the inquiries of a risd Master’s student with the expansive discourses of art and design. In “Go Back!,” Naomi Fry playfully illuminates the transitional moment between educational and professional life. Keller Easterling’s “The Activist-Entrepreneur” provocatively explores emerging roles for artists and designers.

23The gsa Execs showed incredible dedication to the RGB11. Jason Huff (d+m ’11), President; Scott MacDonald (ldar ’11), Vice President; and Dylan Greif (gd ’12), Communications Director, were the three greatest cheerleaders for the book. They always exceeded the call of duty by rolling up their pink sleeves, putting pen to paper, picking up the phone, or cooking a meal to help feed the project.

In the words of Mike Gunderloy, author of How to Publish a Fanzine (1988), “Fun (and its corollary, Friends) is an almost certain outcome of self-publishing.” Talent cannot manifest in isolation. Do not underestimate the power of your peers.

Arianne Gelardin received her Master’s in Landscape Architecture from Rhode Island School of Design in 2011. She is a designer, writer, and editor who has worked on exhibition catalogues for the Whitney Museum of American Art and architectural books for William Stout Publishers. She is a recipient of the 2011 risd Graduate Studies Grant for her project D.CUrbY, an afterschool community design project in Providence.

Jacques Rancière, who, I believe, uses “artist”

to represent both artists and designers, writes:

“Artists are those whose strategies aim to

change the frames, speeds, and scales according

to which we perceive the visible, and combine

it with a specific invisible element and specific

meaning. Such strategies are intended to make

the visible invisible or to question the self-

evidence of the visible; to rupture given

relationships between things and meanings

and, inversely, to invent novel relationships

between things and meanings that were

previously unrelated.”

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Not Necessarily and Not Forever …

Still from Pinkish, a video by Phoebe Stubbs (glass ’11), in which a hand luxuriates in a pot of paint.

As artists, designers, critics, and writers we are chronically engaged in looking — back, ahead, across, around, up, under, and through. We constantly consider, if in an indirect and unacknowledged way, how it is we see, what something looks like — and why. In the third volume of Modern Painters, 19th-century theorist and educator John Ruskin writes: “The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something and tell what it saw plainly. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see.”

Admittedly and confessionally, I watch risd and, in particular, what goes on in graduate education at risd. What does it look like to be a graduate student here? How do learning and making work here look just like they would at any other school of art and design? What might be the subtle yet significant distinctions — and what do we conclude from these? Do we admire and seek to preserve these animating particularities or are they peculiar curiosities that generally remain out of sight or wisely out of mind?

Rainer Ganahl photographs and videotapes classes and seminars that he teaches at universities in Europe and the United States. In Reading Karl Marx (Warm Seas) (2001), he uses the lens of the camera to probe academic settings and conditions of learning to invite viewers to bear witness to patterns, anomalies, and enigmas in the politics of art and education.

As artists, designers, critics, and writers we are chronically engaged in looking — back, ahead, across, around, up, under, and through.

27The photographs serve as an active, introspective form of research, inquiring, prompting, and subtly revealing the salient question that inspires this work: “What does learning look like?” There is the conventional landscape of props on the seminar table: water glasses, pens and paper, and open books, presented in vertigin-ous angles with striking cropping. Students puzzle through dense and stubborn texts, hoping for a passage to yield insight and understanding. Others seem to have withdrawn and are missing in action. As striking as these images are, what making meaning looks like remains highly speculative.

Returning to Ganahl’s query, I add, “What does making look like?” What does designing a new way of thinking about design look like? Must there be something to see to know what something is? Recently, I worked with a graduate student on the subject of critique in design and art. We met weekly in my office at a round table, passed readings and observations back and forth, and shared thoughtful, if often inconclusive, conversations about this ubiquitous yet largely unexamined convention of art and design education. We have discovered that although there are countless texts on criticism in different fields, there is remarkably little written about the critique as a live, performative form of criticism persistently enacted — and re-enacted — in schools.

Looking at looking, theorist and art historian Irit Rogoff offers a provocatively unsettling proposition to culturally determined ways of seeing. In her essay “Looking Away: Participations in Visual Culture,”

28 she proposes an agency inferred in challenges to conventions of looking and looking another way — away. Rogoff asks, “What is it that we do when we look away from art?” By allowing ourselves to both look at and look away, are we “opening up a space of participation whose terms we are to invent”? For Rogoff, “looking away” challenges the conventions of participation with art and creates other ways of engaging in seeing — the “flows and ebbs of mutuality” and an attention to each other’s actions that leads to a “lived cultural moment.”

Rogoff invokes Hannah Arendt’s concept of “space of appearance” in her iconic The Human Condition (1958). Arendt describes the less formed and often ephemeral occurrences and appearances that shape our percep-tions of shared space and time. Arendt writes:

Unlike the spaces which are the work of our hands, it does not survive the actuality of the movement which brought it into being, but disappears not only with the dispersal of (people) … but with the disappearance or the arrest of the activities themselves. Whenever people gather together, it is potentially there, but only potentially, not necessarily and not forever.

Making art and design at risd looks like processes in radical transformation. If the spaces and conditions of art and design schools have not radically changed, the activities and behaviors — and how they appear —

29

I observe each and every day the ineffable and idiosyncratic, spontaneous and premeditated character of thinking with and through ideas that produces a “thick, situated making.”

are thrillingly unsettled. In the book visible: where art leaves its own field and becomes visible as part of something else (2010), sociologist Saskia Sassen sensi- tively describes art and design within a contemporary world that she partially sees, yet that remains undisclosed — obscure:

There are rumblings in … artworks that signal that there is much happening beneath the surface of our modernity. I see these rumblings in the tension between generic modernity that can be globally present and the thick, situated making … [that] allows us to see something that gets lost in the visual order … one marked by generalities and the generic.

At risd, I observe each and every day the ineffable and idiosyncratic, spontaneous and premeditated character of thinking with and through ideas that produces a “thick, situated making.” As vigilantly as I watch, I know that there are worlds I do not see. While I do not look away, I know I cannot always look in. I embrace the looking away and the not knowing that offer partial yet

30 compelling evidence of an emergent visual order. In her book Transforming Knowledge (2004), Elizabeth Kamarck Minnich writes:

There is always another way to turn an idea, another perspective on a phenomenon, a different conceptual approach to explore, a fresh and startlingly suggestive example to be taken into account. What seems settled one moment is unsettled again the next.

In risd graduate students’ intrepid work ethic, their independent intellectuality, their undaunted creativity, their fierce generosity, and their “attention to each other’s actions,” I see how risd’s conserving history cultivates its own emancipatory subversiveness. Each day I am a witness to this. To work to see. To see this work. This time at risd is “only potentially, not necess-arily and not forever,” but its vivid presence offers promising sightlines to the future.

Patricia C. Phillips, Dean of Graduate Studies at the Rhode Island School of Design, is a writer and curator. Her most recent book is Ursula von Rydingsvard: Working (New York: Prestel, 2011).

REFERENCES

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958)

Angelika Burtscher and Judith Wielander (editors), visible: where art leaves its own field and becomes visible as part of something else (New York: Sternberg Press, 2010)

Rainer Ganahl and Craig Martin (editor), Reading Karl Marx (WarmSeas) (London: Bookworks, 2001)

Elizabeth Kamarck Minnich, Transforming Knowledge (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990)

Jacques Rancière, Dissensus on Politics and Aesthetics (London: Continuum, 2010)

Irit Rogoff, “Looking Away: Participations in Visual Culture,” in After Criticism: New Responses to Art and Performance Gavin Butt (editor) (London: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2005)

John Ruskin, Modern Painters, edited and abridged by David Barrie (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1987)

31I see how RISD’s conserving history cultivates its own emancipatory subversiveness.

In an early scene from Cameron Crowe’s 1989

teen dramedy Say Anything the underachieving

protagonist, Lloyd Dobler, watches along with

the rest of his graduating class as his over-

achieving love interest, Diane Court, steps up

to the stage to deliver that year’s valedictorian

speech. Having taken some college classes as

a high school senior, Diane informs the crowd,

“We’re all about to enter the real world. But I

have something to tell everybody. I’ve glimpsed

our future, and all I can say is ‘Go back.’”

Go Back!

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A crowd on opening night next to Laura Swanson's Homemade Bull at the 2011 risd Graduate Thesis Exhibition.

34 To begin to discuss the significance and meaning of an advanced degree in the arts through the prism of an ’80s teen movie might seem idiotic, or at the very least inapt. For one, students who receive an advanced degree in art or design have already, by that point, progressed over a fair amount of trajectory; have jumped through increasingly demanding hoops that have included — for many — laboring in some capacity in or around the creative field of their choice. Nevertheless, the very notion of the Master’s degree — perhaps because it is commenced when most people are already neck-deep in the ongoing narrative of their lives, perhaps because it requires faith in the idea of education as advancement, despite various school-related disillusionments already incurred over the course of years — is still intertwined with the idea of future motion.

As inevitable as it is, however, this idea of futurity also unfortunately implies that the student and her work might emerge from her educational sojourn as a pack-aged, readymade thing. For two or three years, the risd Master’s candidate labors, building this and trying out that, the protective nature of the studio facilitating a unique period of play and experimentation. But as she nears that period’s end, the dread as well as the antici-pation remain: Will all this effort have a life outside the studio, outside the educational institution, or won’t it? Not to suggest that these concerns aren’t completely

35natural, and probably healthy as well: after all, there’s nothing essentially wrong with being ambitious, with wanting one’s endeavors to bear fruit beyond their native soil. The risk, however, is forsaking the explor-atory attitude that graduate school has helped engender, and choosing, instead, to become a hardened end product of the educational process, market-ready, with perfectly defined work in tow.

One thing that often helps retain the symbolic distinction between studio work and the market outside it is the literal geographic remove between the two, and this is something that the risd program is importantly animated by. When selecting a school at which to pursue a degree in art or design, that institution’s proximity to and distance from a so-called “major city” is necessarily calculated. And while this is more of a hunch on my part than a proven statement, I’d venture that this is at least one of risd’s multiple strengths, and what partly makes much of its students’ work

There’s nothing essentially wrong with being ambitious. … The risk, however, is forsaking the exploratory attitude that graduate school has helped engender.

A sense of grassroots-like agency flourishes at RISD, it seems, because of rather than despite the lack of a robust economy and a hectic metropolitan environment.

so interesting. While it’s quite near enough to bask in the reflected cultural influence of New York — the inarguable American hub of and market for art and (to a lesser degree) design-related endeavors — risd is still far enough from it to provide a safe haven in which to experiment, letting a student’s practice develop, shift, and loop back around itself at its own pace. The comparatively small scale of Providence as a city and as a market and the local community’s special interest in and appetite for student-driven endeavors also play an important role in shaping the unique risd experience. A sense of grassroots-like agency flourishes at risd, it seems, because of rather than despite the lack of a robust economy and a hectic metropolitan environment.

But how to retain this sense of freedom, playfulness, and unfettered discovery once school is over, and the three hours and twenty-six minutes from Providence to New York City on Amtrak’s Northeast Regional line shrink down — if only metaphorically — to nothing? For guidance, we might turn to the Victorian critic John Ruskin, who in his 1853 essay “The Nature of Gothic” draws an important distinction between instrumental production and humanistic creation. As Ruskin writes:

You can teach a man to draw a straight line, and to cut one; to strike a curved line, and to carve it; and

37

Perfection suggests repetition and stasis, while mistakes, reflection, and readjustments are the stuff of changeable, living art.

to copy and carve any number of given lines or forms, with admirable speed and perfect precision; and you find his work perfect of its kind: but if you ask him to think about any of those forms, to consider if he cannot find any better in his own head, he stops; his execution becomes hesitating; he thinks, and ten to one, he thinks wrong; ten to one he makes a mistake in the first touch he gives to his work as a thinking being. But you have made a man of him for all that. He was only a machine before, an animated tool.

It is this hesitation, I think, that is the essence of true education and development. And it is that which one might want to retain when leaving school and proceed-ing forth into the world. Perfection suggests repetition and stasis, while mistakes, reflection, and readjustments are the stuff of changeable, living art.

As Lloyd Dobler declares when asked by Diane’s father what his professional plans for the future are, “I don’t want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don’t want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed.” One way to avoid such a machine-like fate, as Diane suggests at the

38 beginning of the movie, is, indeed, to go back. Not as an acting out of an infantilized impulse, or as part of a willful disregard for the realities of the world around us, but rather as a choice: to remember what was especially messy and exploratory about the period that has just come to a close, and to retain that sense while attempting — still — to move forward.

Naomi Fry is a Brooklyn-based writer and editor. She has written about art, literature, and culture for the London Review of Books, Frieze, n+1, the Artforum and Bookforum websites, the Israeli daily Haaretz, and the contemporary art journal Paper Monument, at which she is also a contributing editor. She has taught at Johns Hopkins University and nyu, and in risd’s Digital + Media department.

39Remember what was especially messy and exploratory about the period that has just come to a close.

Anyone graduating from school wants to hear

stories. There are no formulas for success—

only stories about mixtures of good fortune,

accidental associations, and bright, clear ideas.

For the artist and designer, the stories often

characterize success in terms of careerist

self-construction and competition for celebrity.

Yet, as this year’s risd graduate students

demonstrate, more and more young artists and

designers are choosing instead to pursue the

artistic pleasures of the activist-entrepreneur.

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The Activist- Entrepreneur

Working on the Glass department zine at an rgb11 workshop.

The role travels with some default assumptions. The entrepreneurial role, it is often assumed, will derive from some kind of commercial mediocrity. The activist role is often associated with the long-suffering provocateur who shows up at the barricades, border-crossing, or battleground, or the volunteer who works on a limited palette of programs (e.g. afford- able housing, emergency humanitarian efforts, or green architecture). The most restrictive and tragic activist endgames only offer two choices—refusal or collusion.

Yet young artists and designers, like those at risd, are side-stepping these defaults and learning new lessons from the entrepreneur about work in a political realm. While artists and designers frequently wish to make a singular, permanent, memorable masterpiece, entrepreneurs want the opposite, hoping instead that their objects and products, once introduced, will soon become obsolete. The artist/ designer is often attempting to reveal the self with a soulful object, while the entrepreneur is wondering what the other person wants. Within avant-gardist scripts, artists and designers often characterize their work in terms of inversion, yet these inversions have routinely been treated not as one in a series of innovations, but rather as an ultimate utopian shift that remedies all. Historic-ally, we are perhaps more enamored with absolutes and ideological supremacy than with the mysterious

The entrepreneur relies on a changing world that will accept multiple cycles of innovation, each introducing new wrinkles and ideas.

43pleasures of the market with its power to leverage and generate epidemic. We are more theological than entrepreneurial in this way. In contrast to the righteous activist, who imagines a somewhat more transcendent and singular moment of change, the entrepreneur relies on a changing world that will accept multiple cycles of innovation, each introducing new wrinkles and ideas. Entrepreneurs understand the power of multipliers— a contagion or germ in the market that compounds exponentially. Although they often create the utilitar-ian objects of everyday life, the best inventors and entrepreneurs are unreasonable, yet they also fore-ground something that almost already exists.

A fascination with the entrepreneur joins changing habits of mind in our own disciplines. Beyond an appreciation of the singularly authored object, the arts now more readily experiment with networks, performance, and what Jacques Rancière has called “aesthetic practices.” In The Politics of Aesthetics, Rancière develops an understanding of aesthetics that “does not refer to a theory of sensibility, taste, and pleasure for art amateurs.” Aesthetics cannot be codified as a set of guides or rules that culture carefully tends and maintains. Rancière focuses on those aesthetic practices that both “depict” and enact, that articulate “ways of doing and making.” Significantly, he does not discuss the aesthetics of politics, but the politics of aesthetics—the politics surrounding the reception of a work of art. He describes, for instance, not the pageant

44 of goose-stepping soldiers in a Zeppelin field, nor the aestheticizing of resistance as fervid disappointment. Rather, he writes about the way that the reception of art generates political activity. The arts can introduce not only singular objects with cultivated references, but also deliberate agents that move through culture, garnering responses beyond our control. When Rancière writes that he would “rather talk about dissensus than resist-ance,” he describes this interactive process that destabil-izes without squaring off in a fight over fixed principles. Nicolas Bourriaud’s notions of “relational form” and “relational aesthetics” only echo this intelligence although perhaps in response to the narrower field of selected media and installation work. For Bourriaud, art is a “state of encounter” rather than “the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space.” The relational aesthetics do not address outline or contour alone, but are rather expressions for a program of encounters in an active field.

In the broadest sense we might say that artists and designers are indulging in a fresh palette of active forms. Active forms are the forms that always partner with, propel, and sometimes even rescue object form. Active forms shape not the object but the way the object plays. They need not have anything to do with movement, but they are the infinitive to the noun. For instance, in Levittown, the consequential form was not the shape of the house but rather the active form that determined

45an almost agricultural sequence for building multiple slabs, frames, and roofs—a house as an assembly-line product. A vehicle or a component (e.g. elevator, car, floor, or wall system) that acts as a germ in a population of buildings is also an active form, building relation-ships between parts and determining the morphology of object form. Active form may be the script that determines how object form aligns with power to travel through culture. Perhaps most importantly, active forms have the capacity for slyness and discrepancy. As forms that are never named, their intentions are undeclared. They are not about what they say they are, but about what they are doing. Most artists and designers, indeed most powerful people in the world, would never turn down the chance to work with both object and active form. Yet, even though it is at least the other half of what we get to indulge in, we some-times puritanically deny ourselves the pleasures of active form and the political cunning that can ride within it.

The projects of risd graduate students, whether they engage social, political, or material questions, are part of a new seduction. There is great pleasure and relief in

There is great pleasure and relief in deploying political craft in the service of something other than self-regard, careerism, or righteous certainty.

46 deploying political craft in the service of something other than self-regard, careerism, or righteous certainty. The utopian and visionary can sometimes bring with them the deadening reconciliation of consensus, but the entrepreneur’s confidence game teaches us that the less resolute, rumored news might be more contagious. New objects of practice, redefined in a relational register, offer artists more power to leverage their own projects toward their own political goals. That relational register reflects the ability of global networks to amplify struc- tural shifts or repeatable moves. Whether or not schools of art and design are deliberately training young artists and designers in the artistry of active form, it is, none- theless, refreshing to see so many young makers already beginning to enjoy their powers.

Keller Easterling is an architect and writer from New York City and a professor at Yale University. Her book Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and Its Political Masquerades (MIT Press, 2005) researches familiar spatial products that have landed in difficult or hyperbolic political situations around the world. A previous book, Organization Space: Landscapes, Highways and Houses in America, applies network theory to a discussion of American infrastructure and development formats. A forthcoming book, Extrastatecraft: The Art of Infrastructure Change, examines global infrastructure networks as a medium of polity.

47New objects of practice, redefined in a relational register, offer artists more power to leverage their own projects toward their own political goals.

Jewelry + Metalsmithing

Ceramics

Printmaking

Furniture Design

Landscape Architecture

Architecture

Digital + Media

Glass

GRAD- UATE WORK

Painting

Sculpture

Photography

Industrial Design

Textiles

Teaching + Learning in Art + Design

Interior Architecture

Graphic Design

/ Thesis and degree project titles appear at the bottom of each page.

Graduating students were invited to submit images and

statements about their work. Some students submitted only

images, others chose to submit only writing.

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89

122

168

205

55

99

139

169

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69

108

148

178

217

82

116

157

197

218

86

118

158

204

52

/ Arabish: The Cultural Transformation of the UAE

The cultural identity of the United Arab Emirates (uae) is in a

period of transformation. The country’s cultural costumes, habits,

and traditions are evolving and adapting to change. This change

is directly influenced by Western culture, especially mainstream

American culture.

The younger generation of Emiratis behave in a hybrid of both the

American and the Emirati cultures. They speak in English and Arabic

simultaneously. Their clothes have also become a fusion, mixing

traditional Emirati costumes with Western accessories.

In my thesis, I investigate the elements of the Arabish (Arabic &

English) culture of the UAE, its syntactic language, and its appearance.

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/ Memory Archive

My degree project pays homage to our risd graduate experience

by collecting and archiving students’ works, holding memories both

personal and social that can be shared with others. The archive

will function as a storehouse of objects and an exhibition space,

welcoming others to experience the collective spirit of risd. It will

capture our memories as we pass through this threshold, similar in

concept to a time capsule. As time goes by, students’ work will

contintue to accumulate and be stored, eventually becoming part of

our history. This space creates a body of knowledge that explores

the past and reflects and enlightens the present.

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/ Design Agency

The complexity of the social and environmental challenges we face

today calls for a new sense of agency in our practice—agency that is

more than simply a conviction to intervene.

Design Agency is an approach that challenges us to bring the same

level of accountability to our social practice as we do to our aesthetic

one. It was developed as part of a collaborative thesis investigation

with Emily Sara Wilson (see p.214) as a way for designers interested in

effecting social change to cultivate an honest perspective about their

role, to bring a measure of intentionality and reflexivity to their practice,

and to allow collaboration and facilitation to replace the top-down,

designer-centric models of the past.

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/ Creative Perceptions: Bridging the Arts + Sciences within the Art Museum

How do visual inquiry and observation inspire our creativity within

the arts, sciences, and design? As an educator I strive to engage my

audience as a whole through visual inquiry and engaging experiences.

I aim to help visitors understand the significance of the principles of

art and design within our everyday lives.

Working with the Learning Community Charter School, my group

created a tour that sought to connect everyday life with the principles

of art and design. Ultimately my hope is that by building upon

developing educational opportunities, art museum education can lead

to greater appreciation of art and design across numerous fields:

preserving memory, engaging community, and encouraging creativity

as a means for further investigations of everyday life.

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/ Transforming Tradition

My thesis investigates the ritual art of Balinese palm frond weaving.

I interpret the beauty and mystery of ceremonial decorations from

an observant yet external vantage. Through modern weaving technology

and constructions, I alter the material, technique, and function of

a dynamic tradition to create textiles with hybridized graphics and

reinvented forms.

PHOTOGRAPH BY MIMI CABELL

TE

XT

ILE

S /

AN

AST

ASI

A A

ZU

RE

57

/ Small Victories: Growing an Appreciation for Food

I am a thoughtful maker. I believe in the power of collaboration. I strive

to design product cycles — not product lines. My design process

incorporates research, participatory design, and the iterative ideation

of concepts and prototypes. By building connections between people,

environments, and economies, we can create inclusive solutions that

become positive and infectious parts of our world.

Food is central to everything human: from the deeply personal to the

global. Community health, economy, and ecology are all intricately

linked to our need for nourishment. My thesis connects people to food

and ecology through small-scale agriculture. Teaching people to

grow food empowers them to improve their health and wellness, their

communities, and the environments around them.


AU

DR

EY L. B

AR

NES /

IND

US

TR

IAL

DE

SIG

N

58

/ Average Americans of the Right Type

PH

OT

OG

RA

PH

Y /

JO

RD

AN

BA

UM

GA

RTE

N

59

/ Elaborate Longing: Meditations on Work, Substance and the Space Between

Through my work I strive to make sense of my relationship to

substance, value, and labor at a time in history when globalism and

a post-industrial America seem to create as many disconnections as

they do opportunities. I am drawn to the internal contradiction

embodied in the decaying structures of the American rust-belt; they

are simultaneously an enduring testament to human endeavor and a

slow manifestation of nature’s gradual embrace. Striking a tone that

is both somber and playful, I use the visual language of industry and

the ingredients of the built environment — coal, sand, iron ore—

to explore a connection to the processes that construct and sustain

our material world.


JAK

E BECK

MA

N /

SC

UL

PT

UR

E

60

/ Outdesigning Bottled Water in New York City

I am inspired by the complexity within social, cultural, and

environmental arenas. My hope is that thoughtful and ambitious

design will spread within these fields and empower people to

challenge adversity.

My thesis seeks to provide New Yorkers with an alternative to

buying bottled water. By utilizing the social and cultural atmosphere

of New York, I address the negative effects of the industry. Bottled

water is ingrained in our everyday lives. Consumers don’t have desirable

enough alternatives. How can we change such an ingrained behavior?

I think this is where we can use design for positive reinforcement

against existing tendencies to tackle complex issues.


IND

US

TR

IAL

DE

SIG

N /

ELI

ZA

BET

H B

ECTO

N

61

/ Make (Wreck)

I am a home-maker.

I make the home.

I construct and fix.

I build the structure,

and the materials dictate what I make.

I remodel the surface,

managing each decision.

Laying the tile,

nailing the boards,

and hanging the curtains.

I am a home-wrecker.

I wreck the home.

I dismantle and destroy.

I take apart its contents,

uncovering what lies beneath the surface.

I steal from it,

reveal hidden things about it.

Pulling up the rug,

opening the closet,

and turning up the blinds.


KA

THER

INE B

ELL / P

AIN

TIN

G

62

/ Body and Place

My work is my examination of my identity in the context of social,

political, and personal relationships. Body and place are at the nucleus

of my work: identity, femininity, exile and home are addressed through

an exploration of the self and its relations with the outside world. Hot

glass and the performative and collaborative elements of glassblowing

are central in my process. I perform and collaborate using dress and

ritual to construct work in which the surface of my body is the site for

transformative actions. In this work, the personal has become the

political and the political, personal.

GL

AS

S /

ALE

XA

ND

RA

BEN

-AB

BA

63

/ Dwelling in Transition

JOR

DA

N B

ISSETT / IN

TE

RIO

R A

RC

HIT

EC

TU

RE

64

/ Process Book

The walls that divide our homes from nature fascinate me. More

specifically, I am interested in how humans treat natural objects

differently indoors versus outdoors. My work also questions how

we can make these two “environments” more congruous.

I have found the artistic approach of combining photography with

mixed media and site-specific installations a flexible medium to

express my ideas and questions concerning these themes. I’m excited

to continue experimenting with and exploring different materials

and photographic techniques.

TE

AC

HIN

G +

LE

AR

NIN

G I

N A

RT

+ D

ES

IGN

/ K

RIS

TEN

BO

YD

65

/ Incompatible States

An ending.

My practice is framed by incompatible states of the self —

restraint against release, the known with the unknown. My work

engages psychological states of anxiety and scenes of tension —

the fragmentation of the body against an uncertainty of mind. I’m

interested in the attraction of opposites, the force of tense division.

In a wavering step between angst and humor, fear and pleasure,

I want to give form to anxiety, a shape to contradiction. This is the

uncertainty aesthetic, where questions rise above answers.

A beginning.

DER

EK PA

UL B

OY

LE / D

IGIT

AL

+ M

ED

IA

66

/ Both Teams Played Hard


PH

OT

OG

RA

PH

Y /

MIC

HA

EL B

RA

ND

ES

67

/ Process Book

Those who teach art have the potential to be great inspirations.

Giving students the opportunity to explore different concepts,

materials and ideas can be an invaluable experience. I provide my

students with guidance, while simultaneously giving them enough

independence to promote their own artistic discovery. With this

in mind, I define myself in several different ways: I am an artist,

I am a teacher, and I am an art teacher.

BLA

IR B

REN

DLI /

TE

AC

HIN

G +

LE

AR

NIN

G IN

AR

T +

DE

SIG

N

68

/ Symbiotic Implant

The city is a living organism. Scar tissue is the fibrous connective

tissue that results from the biological process of wound repair.

To define scar tissue with regards to the city is to humanize it.

How do we deal with the scar tissue of a city? Do we seal it with

programmatic functions? Do we graft sections of working cities

onto it in the hope that it will grow? Do we surgically remove it and

leave a void? Do we ignore it and let it stretch with age?

AR

CH

ITE

CT

UR

E /

JA

RED

BR

OW

N

69

/ Process Book: Line, Texture, Exploration + Collaboration

Creating art is a learning process that every person, no matter his or

her talent or background, can be involved in. It is my belief that

hands-on, problem-solving skills that children learn while creating

art help them in their daily lives, future schooling, future professions,

and in their emotional and mental health. Every person is innately

creative, and whether they end up in an art field or not, every person

should be given the opportunity to understand how to use and apply

their creativity. As an art educator, I strive to create experiences that

provide this for my students.

KA

THA

RIN

E BR

UM

METT /

TE

AC

HIN

G +

LE

AR

NIN

G IN

AR

T +

DE

SIG

N

70

/ Adaptations: Making Places on a Changing Planet

Longevity

When the salt air had crept into every last recess,

the yawning mouth groaned,

and two centuries of echoing rails plunged into the ebbing tide.

The bridge lay,

smoldering,

sagging,

embedding itself into fecundity.

Releasing its memory in the form of

blue mussels,

eel grass,

alewife.

I came free,

bolts worn, welds corroded, and sank into the mud,

bobbing to the surface as a black goose.

AR

CH

ITE

CT

UR

E /

NIC

HO

LAS

BU

EHR

ENS

71

/ Not Controllable Not Ill-Conceived

I work with text, performance, and video. I am a photographer.

My subjects are contemporary cultural signs and symbols, language

and gender. I aim to destabilize the structures that support them.

I do not apologize and I am not sympathetic. I am direct and do not

like ambiguity. I hear the catches in people’s voices, the discontent.

I do not hear grays in people’s voices, only the blacks and the whites.

I hear yes and no, here and there, on and off. Not maybe, or somewhere,

or running at half speed.

MIM

I CAB

ELL / P

HO

TO

GR

AP

HY

72

/ Riverscape Park: Equilibrium Between Nature and Technology

A riverscape is the landscape of a river system. It constitutes the

various habitats within a river, the processes that create them, and the

communities that reside in them. The site is designed with the

intention of integrating the built world with the larger ecosystem,

creating a balance between nature, technology, and society.

Historically, urban waterfronts reflect the needs of society and change

with the cities they surround. These changes have been caused in part

by the accelerating advancement of technology, which has affected the

surrounding environment. With our city populations growing, the need

for energy and the desire to reconnect with the waterfront is increasing.

Can urban rivers provide for the social, ecological and technological

needs of cities? The river is an opportunity to connect people with

each other and allows the community to build an understanding of their

natural environment.

LA

ND

SC

AP

E A

RC

HIT

EC

TU

RE

/ R

YAN

CA

STR

O

73

/ it will be flowers

“Poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms

the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams

toward survival and change. Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is

the skeleton architecture of our lives. In the forefront of our move

toward change, there is only our poetry to hint at possibility made real.”

—Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider

JENN

IFER CA

WLEY

/ P

HO

TO

GR

AP

HY

74

/ Seeing the Sun: A Strategy for the Prevention and Detection of Skin Cancer

I am a human-centered designer, inspired by people and their bond

to a shared set of principles. Discovery, engagement, and interactions

help me find new opportunities in everyday environments.

My graduate studies focused on the investigation of social values

and their relationship to design. Initially this required a complete

understanding of my own personal values, and was followed by a second

stage where I implemented these new “value-based components”

into my design principles. This shift changed my design practice to one

focused on fulfilling human needs over the manufacturing of wants.

My goal is to design for the general enrichment and benefit of people.


IND

US

TR

IAL

DE

SIG

N /

GU

NTH

ER C

HA

NA

NG

E

75

/ Fold

Fold.

Folding.

Folded.

Fold the unfold.

Fold and unfold.

Fold/unfold.

Unfold and fold.

Unfold the fold.

Unfold.

Unfolding.

Unfolded.


JO-FA

N CH

AN

G /

FU

RN

ITU

RE

DE

SIG

N

Folding is an action of bending a flat and

flexible material by laying one part over

another. When applying folds and their

motion to different functional objects,

there are endless possibilities to be

explored, because folding transforms

objects from one state to another.

The hidden layers of folding are always

there, but it takes time to recognize and

to realize. If even a fold can be redefined,

I am sure there is another whole universe

waiting to be rediscovered.

76

/ The Augmented Body

I am interested in the moment when people augment boundaries

between their bodies and spaces of the imagination. Post-Industrial

Revolution architecture often isolates one’s sense of environment.

Glass structures, mobile systems (such as cars and elevators),

screens — these spaces create a sense of “immaterial” virtual material,

immobile bodies watching mobile images. My work is about how to

form haptic space that breaks the isolation of the senses, awakening

people’s sensation to a place.


DIG

ITA

L +

ME

DIA

/ H

AN

-SH

EN C

HEN

77

/ Unmonumental: Looking Beyond Official Narratives

An official narrative is still very much inscribed in the American

cultural landscape. While significant steps toward a more inclusive

experience have been made, ideological constraints continue to frame

our collective understanding of what constitutes American identity.

My work, a response to this condition, seeks to shift perspectives

and offer an extended look through fixed narratives, rendering them

un-monumental. By claiming the role of outsider, I present an

alternate vantage point. Definitive institutions such as church, state,

and history, are disrupted, questioned, and re-understood. My work

engages what it means to look another way—to look around corners,

and see a fuller picture.

MA

RC CH

OI /

GR

AP

HIC

DE

SIG

N

78

/ Trans: Developing a Business Incubator for Designers

Through the process of commercializing a product, designers relate

with both businesses and customers. Businesses support designers to

develop design ideas that have commercial potential, while customers

provide inspiration by purchasing the product and providing feedback

on their interactions with the product. This project creates one space

that can be shared with these three parties — designers, businesses, and

customers — achieving synergy through solid communication and ease

of interaction.

My intervention is to utilize the idea of transformation to create one

platform that will suit all three entities. In the same way that water

transforms from a solid to a liquid and finally evaporates into a gas, my

space will utilize the transformation of an idea through various stages

of its development.

INT

ER

IOR

AR

CH

ITE

CT

UR

E /

HEN

RY

HY

UN

G M

IN C

HO

I

79

/ Crossing Edges

When meandering through a city, we develop a sense of orientation

with time, place, and people; an understanding of our location in

relation to a specific place or object. I’m interested in the movement

of the individual, where orientation is translated between one’s

surrounding and one’s self.

What is this translation? When we emerge from an underground train

station to the ground plane above, how do we reorient ourselves? Where

does threshold — a cross street that defines boundaries — begin and end

between districts when moving along a path? How does our encounter

with objects, such as the ground or a building, filter our movement and

start to create moments and spaces?

CAR

OLIN

E CHO

U /

AR

CH

ITE

CT

UR

E

80

/ All the Wrong Places: The Assimilation of Residual Spaces into the Urban Fabric

Our sense of identity is fundamentally tied to our relationship to places

and the histories that they embody. The uprooting of our lives from

specific local cultures has contributed to the waning of our abilities to

locate ourselves.

We all have a psychological need to belong somewhere, whether it be

in a geographical or social context. The act of assimilation is a complex

process that not only changes the individual but leaves a lasting impact

on the community.

My work addresses the ramifications of bridging residual spaces,

foreign to the urban system, mentally exterior in the physical interior

of the city, from estrangement into citizenship.

AR

CH

ITE

CT

UR

E /

VA

N H

ON

G C

HU

81

/ Power Play

I am interested in the American popular imagination and how it

manifests itself in, or is manifested by, design and visual culture.

What motivations drive the political and consumer choices Americans

make? What are the value systems that support those decisions?

What role do channels of content distribution, culture and taste,

and visual rhetoric play in shaping and expressing these opinions?

How does the way we envision the world go on to inform the world

or become self-fulfilling?

HO

PE CH

U /

GR

AP

HIC

DE

SIG

N

82

/ Architecture as a Mobile Device

In a world of wireless technologies, is it possible for architecture to

also become mobile? Mobile architecture is nothing new, but alongside

technology, architecture has been steadily evolving toward lightness

and transparency. Is it possible for a new typology to capture the same

level of go-anywhere freedom and autonomy that has been discovered

in mobile devices? This study analyzes high performance tents

and outdoor gear while considering the urban environment and shelters

meant for year-round occupation. The project points toward a new

high-performance way of life: light and mobile, sustainable, urban,

and comfortable.

AR

CH

ITE

CT

UR

E /

MA

RTI

N C

LIN

E

83

/ Empty Houses

Through formal decisions and reductive choices I explore the psychology

of the mundane space of “home.” My paintings evolve from an imagined

environment—a particular set of sounds, colors, textures, spatial

situations, and lighting conditions—and the way these details combine

to form a mood. I find and photograph elements of existing buildings and

neighborhoods and then assemble them into a reference image for this

fictitious place. Through this process I use my immediate surroundings

to create an alternate version of reality—a reality that, though at first

glance appears naturalistic, is in fact composed of slight distortions,

compressions, and omissions.


COR

YD

ON

COW

AN

SAG

E / P

AIN

TIN

G

84

/ Urbansensescape: Creatiing Sensitizing Spaces in Busy Places

My work is about landscape and sensibility. I seek innovative ways

of designing spaces in urban conditions, with an emphasis on taking

advantage of the outdoors and specific qualities that help us to relax,

rejuvenate, and regain mental and physical balance. My passion for

creating heightened sensorial experiences in cities like Manhattan

stems from my upbringing on a farm in upstate New York.

My thesis proposes a pedestrian park in the urban setting to provide

opportunities to engage the senses in a heightened awareness of

mind, body, and spirit.

LA

ND

SC

AP

E A

RC

HIT

EC

TU

RE

/ M

AR

IA D

EBY

E-SA

XIN

GER

85

/ The Art of Not Knowing: Paradoxical Narrative Investigations

Increasingly my work explores the paradoxical relationships between

material and message, and between notions of the tragic and the comic.

It is where these incongruous shifts take place that imagination is

captured. I present the viewer with a series of sculptural diagrammatic

narratives. The viewer is tasked with interpreting the work’s meaning

based on their own personal understandings of the cultural and

symbolic references used in the elements that comprise the piece.

My work can be described as a set of objects displayed before you, with

the hallmarks of a totem disassembled on the floor, which need

the viewer to act as an anthropologist to transcribe their significance.


JOH

NA

THA

N D

ERR

Y /

SC

UL

PT

UR

E

86

/ Experience Guide Book: A to Z

The main concept behind all my work is “small talk with a funny friend.”

I design with the idea that the world is interesting and enjoyable.

It is my desire that my work could affect viewers in two ways: making

people smile and having them spend time with the smile on their faces.


DIG

ITA

L +

ME

DIA

/ K

YON

G-S

UB

DO

87

/ Integrated Practice

My degree project focuses on the recognition of the “other” in

architectural work. Specifically, to understand the relationships

between: the boundaries of context in relation to the project; material

and the design concept it humbles; the architect’s preconceptions

versus the inhabitant’s needs and desires; individual intentions and

collective thought and production. It is a paradox that, by trying

to recognize the”other,” the “other” inevitably becomes a part of one’s

work, which can be daunting. How do you incorporate difference

without subverting individual identity? Where do you draw the line?

Regardless of ability to answer the questions, this empathetic

examination is necessary both in architecture and in our world.

REED

DU

ECY-GIB

BS /

AR

CH

ITE

CT

UR

E

88

/ The American Cinema: Recapturing the Spirit of the Moviegoing Experience

INT

ER

IOR

AR

CH

ITE

CT

UR

E /

CH

AD

ECH

OLS

89

/ Second Pulse

I make art to collect and make sense of the images that shape my

idea of the physical presence of my own body. In my work I layer

various influences, including early medical illustration, decorative

arts, and violent cartoons, to create large-scale wall installations of

collaged drawings and prints. With this process, I have created a series

of narrative scenes involving patterned backgrounds populated by a

cast of intestinal forms that evoke an uncomfortable, mesmerizing

beauty. I am interested in the recombination of grotesque images in

a manner that nudges them toward opulent decoration.


EMILIA

EDW

AR

DS /

PR

INT

MA

KIN

G

90

/ From Knowing to Unknowing

I grew up on the vast flat plains of Illinois. It was empty out there on

the land, by the water, below the sky. My childhood feels like a sunny

place, but it wasn’t always. I had in my imagination the spaces under

a cricket’s wing or below the belly of a snake, the freedom of a summer

day, the small and the big together in an open field, mixed with

a myriad of pets, deaths, pseudo science, winter, divorce, work, and

isolation. Somehow, that is what my work is. I reach in and I empty

these things out. From the places of memory, I collect, sift, sort,

separate, and transform my pasts in order to make them present.

I create light-catching, soft, white, fluid objects that are hollow, empty,

isolated, barren, over-worked, or tedious. They hold dual messages —

purity and loss, hard and soft, weight and weightlessness, memory

and reality, hope and experience.

SC

UL

PT

UR

E /

CR

YSTA

L EL

LIS

91

/ Farmacy

JESSICA FA

NN

ING

/ IN

TE

RIO

R A

RC

HIT

EC

TU

RE

92

AR

CH

ITE

CT

UR

E /

DA

VID

FER

SH

93

/ Design for Development

I believe design is the driving force in determining

the success or failure of any development, ranging

in scale from an urban district to the individual.

BO

BA

CK FIR

OO

ZB

AK

HT /

INT

ER

IOR

AR

CH

ITE

CT

UR

E

94

/ Seeing Through Distraction

Can a culture that bursts with information, increased speed, and

over-stimulation learn how to slow down, look harder, and linger

longer? Can we, as the artist Robert Irwin describes, learn to perceive

ourselves perceiving? My thesis examines how people look, why they

look at what they look at, and how perception can be facilitated.

My projects gently distract, uncover the unnoticed, and slow the eye.

They invite viewers to build individual meaning and ask them to be

more deliberate in their seeing. In my thesis, I utilize the language

of graphic design to address issues of distraction and the rewards of

pause and reflection.

GR

AP

HIC

DE

SIG

N /

ELI

ZA

FIT

ZH

UG

H

95

/ Neverevereven

My process mimics the workings of memory, starting with a specific

place or object, then slowly breaking down, combining, and

transforming. Plaster, wood, and mirrors make up much of my visual

vocabulary because I find these materials to be honest and direct,

bearing traces of time through their distinctive properties, and

engaging an awareness of the present moment. My work suggests

a commitment to longevity and history, knowingly conducted by the

steadfast march of entropy and rebirth.


DA

RR

EN FO

OTE /

SC

UL

PT

UR

E

96

/ What Is a Koan? (Repeat)

Holes in a fence are for peeping.

I would establish boundaries and then let others be cowed, or look

skyward, or investigate the situation and find the physical and mental

points of egress that lead to topography, to cairns and to the highway.

To suddenly feel surrounded should give the viewer pause, but to assess

in that moment the height of the enclosure should elevate the viewer

above the construct — like projecting oneself over a maze to find the

missed turn, but then stopping to consider that one was, in fact, aloft.


SC

UL

PT

UR

E /

JA

MES

FO

STER

97

/ Pedagogical Design: An Elementary School

During my last year at risd, I’ve been exploring elementary school

design within the context of a vacant church building. Specifically,

I have been studying how design can reflect the combination of ideas

from various educational pedagogies and philosophies within an

art-integrated charter school environment. Do the spaces in which

education takes place actually make a difference in a child’s ability to

learn and grasp new concepts? By combining aspects from a variety

of different pedagogies and philosophies, I sought to create something

that is unique, insightful, and ideally can become a typology for

elementary schools to be built in the future.

SAR

AH

FRA

NK

/ IN

TE

RIO

R A

RC

HIT

EC

TU

RE

98

/ 1 to 1

The physical formula

Work stipulates

Energy must be expanded to change the state of

Any Body.

A gift enables a resultant state.

Or disables.

To earn is to walk the ground.

A gift.

AR

CH

ITE

CT

UR

E /

ETH

AN

FR

ENCH

99

/ Between the Lines: A Story about People and Objects at the Table

I design narratives.

My objects live in the space between the lines, in the gap between

the human and the artificial — made of stories, poetry, and imagination.

Like small domestic sculptures, they talk about us and carry the marks

of our existence, becoming metaphors of living — alter egos of

their owners. There is no design in silence. Everything tells a story.


CAM

ILLA FU

CILI / IN

DU

ST

RIA

L D

ES

IGN

100

/ Beyond Awareness: Creating Agency for the Early Detection of Breast Cancer

Design, alone, will not save the world. Designers are emerging, with a

place at the table alongside scientists, engineers, economists, and policy

makers. Like the others, they address some of the most difficult social

issues we face.

I design through iterative experimentation, either actively facilitating

interactions or observing in situ. Living through the everyday minutiae

has the potential to reveal opportunities for design. Design research is

strategic, exploratory, and intuitive.

My thesis looks at the breast cancer awareness movement re-

imagined in the current context. In what ways can we engage women

to be more pro-active of their health? Can social relationships help

facilitate knowledge sharing to promote these behaviors? On a broader

scale, how can a designer, as an architect of choice, help people make

better decisions for health and well-being?


IND

US

TR

IAL

DE

SIG

N /

ELA

INE

YU

RI F

UK

UD

A

101

/ Kaleidoscope Theater

Space and time are objective realities. They are relatively stable and

constant, and sometimes mysterious. However, their conditions change

when a story unfolds, as in theater or a history book. The stability and

rationality of space and time are broken down on the stage. In theater,

the audience is transported into the space and time of the actors,

their actions, and the atmosphere they create, very much so when the

story is performed in a city that is over 3,000 years old — at the very

beginning of the Silk Road.

LEILEI GA

O /

AR

CH

ITE

CT

UR

E

102

/ Revealing the Invisible Layers

Cities are dynamic and multi-layered systems that are physically,

culturally, and historically complex. These layers were designed and

constructed by different people, in different times, with different

functions, without consideration of the connections between these

layers. This has led to an isolated and fragmented contemporary

urban landscape.

My intention is to design interactions between the different

layers — between the bridge infrastructure, the air, and the river,

highlighted by different water levels. By utilizing the space

under the Washington Bridge in Providence and looking at the

changing use of the bridge over time — walking/cycling/boating —

different water levels can be revealed as useful, allowing a more

integrated urban landscape experience.

LA

ND

SC

AP

E A

RC

HIT

EC

TU

RE

/ L

U G

AO

103

/ Wandering in Place

Using the implicit forms of framing and editing in photography, as

well as the literary form of redaction in texts, my work is a venture in

narrative retelling. Reno is an exploration of cultural memory and

inheritance through the revision, reenactment, and recounting of the

myths of place, specifically those of Reno, Nevada.

JENN

IFER G

AR

ZA

-CUEN

/ P

HO

TO

GR

AP

HY

104

/ I Sense Your Reality

In a series of urban vignettes, constructed spaces appropriate the cues

of blind navigation, orchestrating a sensorium that contextualizes the

individual’s position within the larger urban system. An interruption

of light, a momentary shift in kinetic rhythm or temperature, a

re-mastered auditory composition—these sensory prompts introduce

non-image based readings of a once-familiar place, suggesting

another person’s experience. Empathy for others grows out of these

quotidian moments.

LA

ND

SC

AP

E A

RC

HIT

EC

TU

RE

/ A

RIA

NN

E G

ELA

RD

IN

105

/ Yours Mine & Ours

What excites me most is the meaning and insight that comes from

transformative exchange, when the synergy of collective perspectives

enables the birth of a new vision.

We each have the potential to contribute, from our being, toward

socially effective development. Designing both the means and the ends

by which we live out our ideals, we identify our human-environmental

needs and learn together through an iterative exchange. It is not simply

a matter of predicting the future and responding accordingly, but rather

of choosing the future within which we want to live.


STEPH

AN

GO

ETSCHIU

S / IN

DU

ST

RIA

L D

ES

IGN

106

/ A Curious Contrast | Chanced Upon

As our population steadily increases, it is an interesting and distressing

paradox that we are closing into ourselves more and more. We reduce

and barricade the space around us such that we don’t stretch into the

closest person. By eliminating others, however, we are left with just

ourselves. That’s no fun! We miss out on the one thing that transcends

space, time, place, and language: the warmth of human relations. In my

work I create spaces that bring people together, where they chance upon

a journey within, evoking a pleasure that comes with being in the

company of others.


DIG

ITA

L +

ME

DIA

/ R

OH

INI G

OSA

IN

107

/ Tactile Exchange

Most graphic design work today is made while the body remains static,

staring into a computer screen. Gesture — motion deeply encoded

with human identity — is lost.

In my work, I reintroduce the human body into the graphic design

process by combining analog and digital methodologies in an effort

to embrace human gesture. I employ mark making and shifts in scale

to make the body visually evident through handwriting, performative

typography, letterpress, and alternative photographic processes.

My thesis work emerges from a deep love of printmaking’s tactility

and physical scale, and a desire to reinterpret that process within

graphic design.

JESSICA G

REEN

FIELD /

GR

AP

HIC

DE

SIG

N

108

/ The Pixellated Ember: A Nomadic Journey through Psychedelic Fantasy Conceptualism


PR

INT

MA

KIN

G /

STE

FAN

GU

NN

109

/ Growing on the Food Frontier

BR

AD

Y G

UN

NELL /

INT

ER

IOR

AR

CH

ITE

CT

UR

E

110

/ Unfolding the Tiny Quad: Multi-Screens the Korean Way

For an interactive medium of reality.

I used to live along a river that was intertwined with a longer river

that led into a huge sea. I enjoyed catching crabs with my friends

and I remember the moisture and the coldness of sand, the hardness

and the sharpness of a crab, the smell and taste of salt, and the sunset

that said, “Come back home.” I’m not sure why I stopped catching

crabs, whether the crabs themselves disappeared or if Legos and

video games immersed me. However, crab-catching remains the only

authentic piece of interactive nostalgia left in my life.

DIG

ITA

L +

ME

DIA

/ B

YEO

NG

WO

N H

A

111

/ 1 + 1 = ∞ : A Process of Unification

My work, as a whole, attests to the process of unification. To unite is

“to make or become an integrated whole.” Combining two or more visual

concepts relates to my spiritual practice. I follow the emblematic

meaning of Pan-Africanist philosopher Marcus Garvey: There is “one

God, one aim, one destiny.” In this light I see myself, my art, and the

world around me as a synthesized whole.

The work’s physical form is printed and hand-dyed textiles on natural

fibers, recognizable by its representation and achievement of simplicity,

balance, and luminous color.


RICO

A. H

AR

RIS /

TE

XT

ILE

S

112

/ In the Fold

I create paintings that unite a wide range of associations into a uniquely

coalesced form. In rearranging hierarchies, injecting the personal

into the socially constructed, and manipulating high and low, my work

exposes, explores, and pushes boundaries of taste, materiality,

phenomenology, and abstraction. I want to bring together a pastiche

of information that depicts the world as I experience it in a richer,

weirder, and more complex pictorial way.


PA

INT

ING

/ C

OLL

IN H

ATT

ON

113

/ The End of the Line

“We must never forget that we are human, and as humans we dream,

and when we dream we dream of money.” —G. Lang

OM

ER H

ECHT /

PH

OT

OG

RA

PH

Y

114

/ Providence: Ruin and Restoration

Through my thesis work I seek to document and explore the

contradictions inherent in the cityscape of Providence, how the

sensations created by urban decay and restored architecture

are redefined through a dialogue with human experience. By

combining these elements into textile designs, my hope is to offer

a perspective that engages with the present as well as the past.

As these narratives unfold in my process, I aim to reassemble them

in fabrics and garments that exhibit the tensions of the permanent

and transient, the new and old, the clean and rough, the bare

and the covered.


TE

XT

ILE

S /

VED

RA

NA

HR

SAK

115

/ The Senses Distillery

CYN

DIA

HSU

/ IN

TE

RIO

R A

RC

HIT

EC

TU

RE

116

/ Are We Not Drawn Onward to New Era

Wiktionary defines the noun ‘artist’ (Singular: artist; Plural: artists) as follows:

A person who creates art.

A person who creates art as an occupation.

A person who is skilled at some activity.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the older broad meanings of the term ‘artist’:

A learned person or Master of Arts

One who pursues a practical science, traditionally medicine, astrology, alchemy, chemistry

A follower of a pursuit in which skill comes by study or practice

A follower of a manual art, such as a mechanic

One who makes their craft a fine art

One who cultivates one of the fine arts - traditionally the arts presided over by the muses

A definition of Artist from Princeton.edu: creative person (a person whose creative work

shows sensitivity and imagination).”

—http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artist#Dictionary_definitions


DIG

ITA

L +

ME

DIA

/ J

ASO

N H

UFF

“

117

/ The Community Center of the Arts

SEUN

G H

WA

N H

WA

NG

/ IN

TE

RIO

R A

RC

HIT

EC

TU

RE

118

/ A House of Revelation

The definition of figure and ground is expanded, from a simple

perception based on contrast, to include abstract binary concepts such

as melody/harmony, positive/negative, public/private, and inside/

outside. Both a series of material experiments revealing an emergence

of rust from within and the interpretation of The Last Judgment by

Michelangelo provide analytical tools which are of considerable value in

assessing the epistemological importance of these terms. Spatial and

ephemeral aspects of these concepts are recognizable through the

complexity, variety, and abundance of an individual, clusters, or chunks

of bodies with their postures, movements, gestures, and expression.

As a contemporary confession, my thesis examines a house shared

with various occupancies in which a linear story does not exist, but

different realities coexist.

AR

CH

ITE

CT

UR

E /

TA

IGO

ITA

DA

NI

119

/ Navigational Dreaming: Authorship of Socio-Political Space

“Pain and imagination are both a condition of intentionality and each

other’s counterpart. They are the framing events for man-as-creator

in which all other intimate perceptual, psychological, emotional, and

somatic events occur.” — Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain

I am interested in how we become implicated into each others’

sentience through verbal and material artifacts, how people become

visible or cease to become visible to us. Located at the intersections

of language, navigation, and architecture, in my work I attempt to

understand the possibilities of agency and the creation of a spatial

structure of affirmation.

AI ITO

/ A

RC

HIT

EC

TU

RE

120

/ Urban Hive: A Social Hub in the Middle of an Urban Habitation

Can the coexistence of public and private space in an urban habitation

influence the relationship between residents, visitors, and the

community? How can a mixed-use structure foster interaction and

create synergy between both public and private inhabitants? My thesis,

using the term “hive” as a social metaphor, explores the dynamic

exchanges that occur by creating a program in which private and public

space freely overlap.

INT

ER

IOR

AR

CH

ITE

CT

UR

E /

SEO

YEO

N JI

N

121

/ The Cultural Apocalypse

With digital communication and functionless objects as my muses

I collaboratively and independently fuck iconoclasm.

“Over absurdity, confusion, and overstimulation sits the work:

a detonation of materials, information, and fervency that

simultaneously assaults and blames the viewer. Vaguely domestic

environments, hobby-crafted tactile media, and digital moving

pictures exist in the hole between past and future while dismantling

the present. Combined with performance and temporary public

projects a question surfaces: What does it mean to outsource

one’s cultural values?” —Abigail Blank, July 16, 1945

LEE JOH

NSO

N /

CE

RA

MIC

S

122

/ Dynamo

As a field of study, architecture has been and will continue to be about

how we occupy and experience space. Often the study is “the new.”

Ideas are planted in virgin ground or are bulldozed and started again.

We are no longer in an economic- or resource-rich world, and so I

ask, how can we begin to reoccupy existing pieces of deteriorated

architecture as if they are the new, open, and untouched landscapes?

With limited funds and a minimal impact, remnants of urban

infrastructure — skeletons — are what we need to reuse, to design

within. We must find a balance between the reoccupation of

nature and man.

AR

CH

ITE

CT

UR

E /

TH

OM

AS

JON

AK

123

/ Finding New Flavor

HO

GIL JU

NG

/ IN

TE

RIO

R A

RC

HIT

EC

TU

RE

124

/ To Embrace the Universe

Rooted in the study of scientific phenomena, my work explores

elemental processes as a means of making an image. I employ chemical

reactions, harness natural forces, and execute physical procedures. I use

basic materials such as ink and bleach as I attempt to achieve a richness

of results through an economy of means. With an empirical approach,

I examine, manipulate, and orchestrate processes, capturing the residue

that they leave behind as my subject matter. These traces are often

abstract and geometric in form; circles, spirals, and grids reveal the

beauty and order inherent in the physical world.


PA

INT

ING

/ A

NIN

A F

IELD

KA

LLO

P

125

/ Process Book

I am concerned with the act of looking — both in my own work and

in my teaching practice. It can be difficult to maintain the curiosity

necessary to appreciate the inspiration of our environments. When

I am able to maintain that curiosity, I find that I am endlessly fascinated

with my surroundings. In my teaching practice, I search for ways to

impart that fascination to students.

I believe art can have enormous power and relevancy in our lives;

it can transform our environments. Learning to look allows students

to make connections between art and their everyday experiences.

Learning to look makes art accessible.

JENN

IFER K

ALLU

S / T

EA

CH

ING

+ L

EA

RN

ING

IN A

RT

+ D

ES

IGN

126

/ Natural Imagination: Reconnecting Urban Children with Nature

Inspiration emerges from curiosity. Through observation, my creations

respond to the natural inclinations and needs of people by

encompassing five main principles: adaptability, helpfulness,

playfulness, functionality, simplicity.

My designs purposefully involve people, helping both the individual

and the society. Form, function, and empathy are the tools I use

to unfold new interactions between objects and people.

My thesis explores engaging catalysts to reconnect urban children

with their surrounding natural environment. Through design

I am making natural experiences accessible and increasing children’s

exposure to nature triggering interaction and imagination.


IND

US

TR

IAL

DE

SIG

N /

CH

RIS

TIN

A K

AZ

AK

IA

127

/ Nodal Connections: The Integration of Architecture and Rail Along the Main Spine of St. Louis

What architectural seed can be implanted within a city that will alter its

fabric and create a lasting impact?

My thesis examines new ways of uniting disconnected parts of

St. Louis with an elevated light rail system, while also creating new infill

buildings along the transportation line that serve as stop locations.

Both the urban scale and architectural building scale strive to address

whether it is possible to implement new transportation strategies

into an urban landscape that addresses the pedestrian and could serve

to revitalize a struggling city.

ALEX

AN

DER

KELLER

/ A

RC

HIT

EC

TU

RE

128

/ Immobile IMMOBILITY

My current practice investigates the orphaning and displacement of the

object in the historical contemporary. Because my work is an alternation

between”cropping” and “sharing,” I’d like to pronounce that I am more a

“sharecropper” than an artist. My practice often involves collaboration

with dancers, advertising performers, Chinese painters, corporeal mime

artists, and massage therapists. I produce scenes and objects taken out

of the context of theater, while simultaneously referencing its historical

failure. In my current body of work, my production considers the object

via speculative philosophy for the non-ordained.


DIG

ITA

L +

ME

DIA

/ B

ENJA

MIN

KEN

NED

Y

129

/ Cut+Run: Video Graphic Design

Behind every good cabinet of curiosity is a collector — one who

finds the most common ephemera worth noticing and storing. This

collector seeks, often without intention, with an acute awareness

of the wonderful. Each item is a totem of places found and memories

evoked. The cabinet is lined with shelves and compartments, fixing

each item to a homestead in relation to the others. However, their

placement is temporary and, at the whim of the collector, they are

swiped clean and rebuilt. In so doing, a new collection is created and

meaning is transformed.

LYN

N K

IAN

G /

GR

AP

HIC

DE

SIG

N

130

/ Appearance | Disappearance: Constant Motion in Time

Architecture should never be considered a static, finished product.

Rather than fighting its changing surroundings, architecture should

allow for change. In this way it can develop rather than degrade from

the moment of completion. In this evolution of architecture, what is

mutable and what is fixed?

The landfill is understood as a continuously moving surface, the

result of oblivious collective behavior, disposing of the unwanted.

Using a site that is unstable and volatile, architectural intervention

embodies a conscious effort of collective commitment.

AR

CH

ITE

CT

UR

E /

MEG

AN

YO

UN

GK

YU

NG

KIM

131

/ Small Steps, Big Impact: Promoting Ecological Skills and Responsibility in Children

Most revolutions that change the world in new, beautiful, and abundant

ways come through small, incremental behavior changes.

My thesis started from my goal to learn, investigate, and instill my

ecological caretaking role as a designer in the next generation. I created

tools and resources that gave opportunities for children to develop an

appreciation of the environment.

Where can I take design to help children become aware of the

importance of conserving the environment? What role can I play as a

designer to help children create a sustainable future? What small steps

can create a bigger impact, fostering sustainability in our everyday life?


NA

REE K

IM /

IND

US

TR

IAL

DE

SIG

N

132

/ Healing through Social Activation

Healing is a process and a transitional period. It is a turning point to

recovery, the start of a journey in which survivors resolve fears, achieve

self-actualization, gain confidence, and live beyond cancer. The collab-

orative act of gardening promotes social interaction among cancer

survivors, enabling them to build bridges among themselves, staff, and

caregivers. More importantly, the relationship between survivor and

plant is symbiotic. Plants need constant support and care. Survivors,

through providing that care, gain a sense of accomplishment and self-

control, creating a foundation for living beyond fear. It is a co-creative

process, where survivors and nature are essential to each other.

INT

ER

IOR

AR

CH

ITE

CT

UR

E /

KA

YLA

SO

O-Y

OU

N K

IM

133

/ Experience: Perception + Orthographics

Representation superimposes mathematics on the spaces we perceive.

It often manifests perception in abidance with strict frameworks based

on pure, geometric misunderstandings of optics; it supposes that

experience blindly follows math. At times we experience through

schema, both strict and interpretive, both learned and innate, but in

the same moment, architectural space changes — even dimensionally —

for reasons personal to us.

We inhabit and design by assembling perceptual and orthographic

space simultaneously. My thesis is an investigation to equalize

geometry (earth measure) and perception (taking in), by consciously

accounting for the influence of memory, emotion, and attention.

WILLIA

M K

IMM

ERLE /

AR

CH

ITE

CT

UR

E

134

/ Steering the Crowd

In most contemporary cities, we move amongst dense packs of people

throughout the day without notice. Crowd creation can become

dangerously unpredictable and, at times, lead to tragedy. The line

between crowd and crush is almost imperceptibly thin. I have created

an architectural blueprint to solve future calamity by examining past

crowd tragedies and uncovering the patterns of failed design. An

architecture emerges that embraces the industrial and maritime history

of the chosen site in Vancouver, British Columbia. The grounds offer

a myriad of potential programmatic uses. Likewise, an infrastructure

presents itself to be manipulated, and innovative arrangements reveal

themselves to be created.

AR

CH

ITE

CT

UR

E /

BR

AD

LEY

KIS

ICK

I

135

/ An Urban Environmental Center for The Woonasquatucket River Watershed Council

Wild elephants swim in the Woonasquatucket River. At least they did

during one hot July evening in 2008 when the river’s full story came

alive in my dreams. The juxtaposition of these graceful giants gliding

through the murky downtown canals continues to linger as I construct

my degree project.

The design uses the ghost of the Riverside Worsted Mill compound

to form the identity of the present intervention. The beautifully

deteriorating masonry mill shell becomes a sculpture within the bounds

of the new center.

LISA K

LING

ER /

INT

ER

IOR

AR

CH

ITE

CT

UR

E

136

/ Capturing the Ephemeral

Water drips, trickles, meanders, gurgles, gushes,

bubbles, sprays, splashes, surfs, cascades,

falls, plunges, churns, rumbles, surges, swells,

pounds, crashes, rages, roars, overflows, floods,

inundates, drifts, melts, freezes, evaporates,

and dissipates. Water flows, moves on, and leaves

behind its imprints.

Can architecture provide, for both the visitor and

the community, a space for “immersion,” immersion

in water, immersion in culture, immersion of the

senses, immersion in thinking, immersion in

making? Can the impressions left behind by such

immersions humbly remind us of our oneness

within an ineffable whole, and inspire respect and

awareness for this limited resource?

AR

CH

ITE

CT

UR

E /

AD

A T

AK

KO

137

/ Dependency: Mutually Reliant Furniture

I am inspired by relationships and how different entities interact.

All living things are dependent on each other in some way or another.

and I enjoy exploring this dependency in the form of furniture.

I translate symbiotic and intimate relationships in nature into material,

structure, and connections. The human body plays an integral part in

my furniture. Muscles and joints can aid in making components

functional, forming new structures. A one-legged stool will not stand

without the use of human legs, and the human cannot sit without

the wooden stool.


AN

DR

EW K

OP

P /

FU

RN

ITU

RE

DE

SIG

N

138

To Vitruvius’s “utilitas, firmitas, venustas,” I would add “civitas.”

Architecture is an expression of civic responsibility.

“& hence

the web of life is woven, and the tender sinews of life created.”

— William Blake

AR

CH

ITE

CT

UR

E /

BR

ITTN

EY K

AIL

ESE

KR

OO

N

139

/ The Good(s) Life? Awakening from our Subconscious Lifestyle of Conspicuous Consumption

My thesis questions the paradigm of conspicuous consumption within

the incredibly vague yet widely embraced concept of the “American

Dream.” It explores the motif behind the reasons we buy things and how

a general lack of awareness of the effects of consumption affects both

individuals and the people that surround them. My intention is not

only to convey this awareness, but also to offer coping mechanisms

in response to the allures of consumerism. In a world where noise is

everywhere, silence speaks for itself.


CALV

IN K

U /

IND

US

TR

IAL

DE

SIG

N

140

/ Exile from Memory


DIG

ITA

L +

ME

DIA

/ Y

ASI

MIN

KU

NZ

141

The construction process in today’s building environment is managed

by the ease, low cost, and standardization that our society demands.

I explore how a building can open a conversation between design,

construction, and space. Can we as architects introduce a building

system that allows for repetition and ease in the construction process,

leaving the design up to the inhabitants? This question is in response

to the mass-produced home, which is stamped across a site, which

starts and stops at the color of the exterior, disregarding site, culture,

and inhabitation.

EDW

AR

D LA

EMM

EL / A

RC

HIT

EC

TU

RE

142

/ Rediscovering the Enchanted Forest

I have always been interested in storytelling and the transformations

that occur as a story is told and retold. Through drawing and painting

I am able to compose moments in time, creating and combining images

to describe my own personal mythology.

My thesis collection intends to evoke the narrative of fairy tales as

it exists within. I imagine characters and readers who venture into an

enchanted forest and choose to stay rather than find their way out.

Knit garments are inspired by the lush textures of ancient trees; ghostly

wall coverings echo the voices of mystery and antiquity.


TE

XT

ILE

S /

ELI

ZA

BET

H L

AM

B

143

/ Returning to Homeland: Architecture and Cultural Values

Architecture is a physical body that not only represents culture but

also facilitates the development of social behavior and cultural patterns.

I lament that modern Korea is losing many of its unique ways of

building from earlier eras to homogenous cityscapes of modernity.

I propose a University Campus Research Center adjacent to an

expected flood zone from the construction of a dam on the upper

stream of the longest river in Korea. The program aims to compensate

for the environmental impact and loss of historic landmarks, as well as

to create local industry. The design follows the characteristics of

traditional architecture in a modern language. Ascending roof lines,

eaves, pathways, and courtyard spaces are loosely connected to define

porous boundaries.

SHIN

AH

LEE / A

RC

HIT

EC

TU

RE

144

/ Hybrid Gaze: Digital Artifacts and Memory

I create or appropriate 3-D digital models and graphics based on

my childhood memories. This allows me to scrutinize not only my own

psychology, but also the empathic resonances of the socio-cultural

engagement of digital models. Examining the broader social

implications of digital artifacts, my works question and challenge

the general notion that they are impersonal.


DIG

ITA

L +

ME

DIA

/ J

AE

OK

LEE

145

/ Transportable Space

Due to the advancement of technologies, the modern lifestyle is

faster, more flexible, and prone to change. The form and location of a

building can be shifted in a second with a simple computer program.

However, once built, architecture still remains a somewhat permanent

medium. Because of this permanence, architecture has difficulty

accommodating change. Mobility and flexibility in architecture is less

dominant than stability and firmness. Understanding adaptability

within architecture can improve the way in which we approach

traditional architectural alterations.

My thesis observes the relationship between transient and permanent

space by using an architectural language. By exploring the juxtaposition

between presence and void, flexibility and rigidity, I would like to find

a way to convey the rapid changes of advanced technologies within the

setting of traditional architecture.

AR

AN

LEE / IN

TE

RIO

R A

RC

HIT

EC

TU

RE

146

/ Finding Lost Space

This project started from my personal interest in looking at the quality

of abandonment. I have always thought that lost spaces have energy that

eludes explanation, and this energy continues to inspire me to imagine

spaces that can become so much more than what they currently are.

Spaces that have lost their function; prominence or visibility have not

lost their potential. This project seeks to “find” these spaces and

reimagine the program and design approach to reeducate the public to

see them. By discovering “lost” spaces and rejuvenating them, the

project provides a place of pause, a “third” space in the trajectory of our

busy daily lives. This method demonstrates the potential to revitalize

urban landscapes, which can be applied to any city.

INT

ER

IOR

AR

CH

ITE

CT

UR

E /

JU

NG

EU

N L

EE

147

/ Realizing Empathy

After a nine-year career practicing both computer science and

interaction design, I have spent the last three years in a traditional art

school immersed in dialogue with physical materials—including

my own body. Through a series of studies in acting, dancing, drawing,

writing, and making with clay, glass, light, metal, paper, plaster, plastic,

type, and wood, I realized that making with physical materials

is analogous to engaging in an empathic conversation with another

person. Based on this experience, I imagine in my work how

our interaction with computation can afford the same qualities.

SEUN

G CH

AN

LIM /

GR

AP

HIC

DE

SIG

N

148

/ Architecture Pro Tempore: Time, Speed, and Agency

Who are you, and where are you? What is the form of your belonging?

Temporary architectural installations abound, with timelines stretching

back centuries or even thousands of years. We dwell in a panoply

of constructions for the body and soul, unique genetic markers of time

and place. The Passamaquoddy, a Native American tribe in eastern

Maine, believed that rock was a house for spirits — but even rock is

temporary. How, then, do you define your community, your place, your

space? Your active participation is the genetic marker for your

existence — your active awareness, its quality and inherent order.

AR

CH

ITE

CT

UR

E /

CA

RO

L A

NN

LIV

ING

STO

NE

149

/ Embrace

Interior Architecture is an art where creativity flourishes under

restrictions, limitations, and perceived potential. This art form

often yields a product far more inventive, intelligent, and elegant

than a project free from boundaries and confines.

I explore the perceived design limitations associated with the

disability of autism, commonly regarded as a sensory processing

disorder. I celebrate these restrictions in a design tailored

specifically for individuals with autism. The way in which these

individuals experience a space is not wrong, simply different.

Emanating from perceived limitations, a therapy space for those

with autism will flourish.

AB

IGA

IL LULEY

/ IN

TE

RIO

R A

RC

HIT

EC

TU

RE

150

/ Mundane: Memory | Perception | Imagination

“My power to reach the world and my power to entrench myself in

phantasms only [come] one with the other; even more: [it is] as though

the access to the world were but the other face of a withdrawal.”

—Maurice Merleau-Ponty

LA

ND

SC

AP

E A

RC

HIT

EC

TU

RE

/ S

COTT

MA

CDO

NA

LD

151

/ Natural Fantasy

How are ecological actions transformed through digital tools? The

advent of technology in the age of advanced capitalism might seem to

have empowered humanity, but more often than not it abates the

critical imagination needed to act meaningfully by espousing fantastic

images that besiege thinking and divert true action. Ecology through

many contemporary modes of electronic media has eroded our critical

ability to relate to the natural systems around us, and as such requires

a cultivation of imagination in order to establish stronger ecological

bearings and engage with complex environmental issues. My work is

about overcoming the impediment of fantasy by composing new forms

of action, where ecology is not just mediated, but is rather a medium

for imagination.


MIK

HA

IL MA

NSIO

N /

DIG

ITA

L +

ME

DIA

152

/ The Fish Market Restaurant

Meant to send this earlier in the day but fell asleep—

Egodystonic whatever and I’m trying to fuck Sharon Stone, like every

fucking day.


.

PR

INT

MA

KIN

G /

DA

VID

MA

Y

153

/ An Illusion of Progress


RYA

N M

CINTO

SH /

PR

INT

MA

KIN

G

154

/ Process Book: Harmony

As an arts educator, I want to facilitate learning fueled by wonder and

awe. I believe that this type of learning encourages passion and creates

deeper understanding. Understanding is more intuitive and much less

prescribed when there is an element of magic involved. If nothing else,

the way we educate students should be in direct relation to, or perhaps

in collaboration with, their lives.

TE

AC

HIN

G +

LE

AR

NIN

G I

N A

RT

+ D

ES

IGN

/ K

IRST

EN M

CNA

LLY

155

/ Inside/Out: Schoolyards as an Extension of Education

The fundamental question that drives my thesis investigation is

how to provide an educational environment that benefits the whole

child, while considering their individual learning style. Through the

vehicle of landscape architecture I approach the restructuring of

ill-equipped and poorly designed schoolyards. Instead of continuously

treating these important spaces as an afterthought, we might begin

addressing them as valuable opportunities, capable of bridging the gaps

between learning and play and between a school’s curriculum and the

surrounding context. Initiating a conversation within the school’s

immediate vicinity facilitates a holistic educational experience that

can manifest itself within the curriculum while strengthening the

fabric of community.

LAU

REN

MEEN

A /

LA

ND

SC

AP

E A

RC

HIT

EC

TU

RE

156

/ Between Rhetoric and Reality: Spaces of American Democracy

My work focuses on the unique yet everyday spaces of democracy in

the United States: the voting booth, the jury deliberation room, and the

naturalization ceremony rooms where immigrants become citizens.

I photograph America, exploring the perceptions between the rhetoric

of American democracy and the realities of the often banal spaces

where democracy is manifest.

PH

OT

OG

RA

PH

Y /

MIC

HA

EL M

ERG

EN

157

/ Process Book: The Art of Looking

As an artist and new educator, I am constantly processing what I see.

I do this in the hopes of expanding upon what I know and to explore

what could be possible.

I seek to increase my students’ understanding of their surrounding

visual world. I want them not only to take a second look at the familiar,

but to see a subject from multiple perspectives, encouraging them

to envision possibilities and to build connections. It is my hope that

through my teaching, my students will learn to look.

CHR

ISTINA

MILES /

TE

AC

HIN

G +

LE

AR

NIN

G IN

AR

T +

DE

SIG

N

158

/ Functional Concepts of Nomadism

I had just turned 27 when I applied for graduate school. While it

seemed like the next logical step, the plummeting economy had me

doubting whether it would actually pay off. My other option was to live

a life away from society, migrating from southern to northern Arizona.

I decided that my future would ride on the outcome of the looming

presidential election.

My thesis tells the story of my alternate life: the life I envision

I would have lived had the outcome of the election gone differently.

The objects I created during this fictitious nomadic journey fit

somewhere between camping gear and high-end mobile furniture,

formulating the stories of my travels that suggest how other cultures

and people live their lives.


FU

RN

ITU

RE

DE

SIG

N /

RYA

N M

UR

RA

Y

159

/ May Not Architecture Again Become a Living Art?

Space is only what you make of it (so let’s go get a karaoke machine).

SHER

ATA

UN

NU

SS / A

RC

HIT

EC

TU

RE

160

/ Process Book: Lessons on the Everyday

For me, art education is about the everyday and seeing the familiar

differently. In my teaching practice, I hope to provide new ways for

students to experience their environments and communicate their

observations. I hope to encourage learners to question and find meaning

in the ordinary. As a result the arts become more accessible and the

classroom becomes a place where learners push their skills beyond what

they think are the limits of their abilities. Art education is about

creating, but it is also about pausing to look longer, more closely, and

with intention. It is about finding the extraordinary within the ordinary.

TE

AC

HIN

G +

LE

AR

NIN

G I

N A

RT

+ D

ES

IGN

/ A

LLIS

ON

PA

CE

161

/ Production

Clay is my material. It has a memory, it preserves the evidence of

touch, and its processes are important to my studio practice. I use

forms from my surroundings — such as architecture, landscape,

and machines — to intuitively build my own “shape” vocabulary,

producing angles that loosely reference my environment. By

making pieces based on memory, I can push, distort, and create

pieces that are ultimately playful in quality.


JASO

N PA

CHECO

/ C

ER

AM

ICS

162

People’s interaction in society—a theme my art shares with my

previous vocation of American historian—fascinates me. I’ve known all

along that how people act and how they look accord with where they

are and who’s interacting with them. As an artist I note the way light

compounds the role of social interaction, influencing personal

appearance in the eyes of a range of viewers. Not surprisingly, portraits,

including my own, have long intrigued me. Does a healthy dose of

vanity nourish my love of self-portraiture? That may well be; I often

return to self-portraiture, compelled by the many ways my hand

translates my image.


PA

INT

ING

/ N

ELL

PAIN

TER

163

/ Dark Glass: Recordings for a Vessel

I reflect on the history and processes of printmaking through framing,

isolating, and obscuring the subjects within my work. This process

creates situations where a clearly composed viewpoint is presented to

the viewer, but the focal point is obscured or obstructed. Printmaking

methods are a filter through which I clarify and distill my ideas about

representation; engagement with these processes reflects my way of

perceiving the world.


LAU

REN

PAK

RA

DO

ON

I / P

RIN

TM

AK

ING

164

/ Brand Meets Hospitality

The world of commerce is changing. It is now not enough for companies

to merely sell a good product — they must sell an experience, an image,

an idea. The purpose of my degree project is to create a cultural

hospitality space sponsored by a global prestigious brand group, lvmh.

This space is not used to sell their products, but to bring and blend

their core value and brand identity into the interior architecture

so that visitors can recognize them consciously and unconsciously

while eating, drinking, and socializing in this space. With a

comprehensive understanding of the brand, how to translate the brand

identity and values into the interior architectural language becomes

the essential issue.

INT

ER

IOR

AR

CH

ITE

CT

UR

E /

JA

E H

YU

N P

AR

K

165

/ Visual Thunder

The decadent happenings of the hours of darkness have punctured my

being. The shooting stars of the cosmos battle the flashing lights of the

metropolis. Within the mask of the night, fabulously adorned figures

flutter in the glitz and glamour of disco.

I utilize elements from the costume jewelry industry to induce a

new life in them. I believe all that glitters is gold. The superficial layer

of glamour in my work rejuvenates a rusty and tired piece of steel.

At the end of the day we are all ugly and we are all beautiful. We are

all just human.


KA

THER

INE CH

ASE P

ETERS /

JEW

EL

RY

+ M

ET

AL

SM

ITH

ING

166

/ Disgusting Comfort: The New American Dream

“And so, with a bitter struggle, I resigned him to his fate, fastened myself

to the cask by means of the lashings which secured it to the counter,

and precipitated myself with it into the sea, without another moment’s

hesitation. The result was precisely what I hoped it might be. As it is

myself who now tell you this tale — as you see that I did escape — and as

you are already in possession of the mode in which this escape was

effected, and must therefore anticipate all that I have farther to say.”

—Edgar Allen Poe, A Descent into the Maelström, 1841


.

CE

RA

MIC

S /

BEN

JAM

IN P

ETER

SON

167

/ Sostenuto

I am interested in the anxiety between tension and release. In music

theory, this is known as dissonance and consonance — where

unharmonious chords are built up and held to allow for more resonant

and harmonious chords. Not all resolutions that provide relief, however,

are perfectly harmonious. Sometimes anxious tension is relieved

through failure, especially from the machine. The unblemished car,

for example, remains a source of anxiety until the day it receives its

first dent or scratch. This tension is where my work plays, within

the juxtaposition of the anxious and the failed.

JUSTIN

PH

ILLIPSO

N /

DIG

ITA

L +

ME

DIA

168

/ Contiguous Pictures: A Preface

As part of an interdisciplinary practice that includes painting, drawing,

photography, writing, and audio, I make work that draws on my broad

interests in psychology, memory, and language. I employ restraint,

withholding, and distance, using disparate approaches to construct

visual and audible experiences that balance presence with absence and

truth with fiction. Through these layered mediums and methods, my

work offers a temporal experience using surrogacy and substitution to

represent reality and, as in my current work, to mimic the often

complex, fragmented, and inventive ways we might consciously and

unconsciously recollect.


PA

INT

ING

/ A

NN

A P

LESS

ET

169

/ Celestial Resonance

In a peri-urban area of Bangkok, urbanization has decreased a sense

of community, resulting in a physically connected but socially isolated

neighborhood. My thesis explores how a shared response to an urban

annual flood can serve to build new social interactions. During the flood,

residents participate in the collective construction of an ephemeral

flood landscape, creating a moment of collaboration—a physical and

social space that provides reciprocity between community members.

PO

NN

APA

PR

AK

KA

MA

KU

L / L

AN

DS

CA

PE

AR

CH

ITE

CT

UR

E

170

/ This Situation May Appear Bleak for Wildlife

“Everything is everywhere, but the environment selects.”

—Baas-Becking hypothesis, 1934

The designer makes a ground, and biota it collects.

The ground is an instrument, biology the keys.

Designer ecosystems tailored to our future needs.

LA

ND

SC

AP

E A

RC

HIT

EC

TU

RE

/ I

AN

QU

ATE

171

/ Probability Cloud

Design is called on to assist with everything from social issues to

serious environmental concerns. As we negotiate these situations, it is

critical that we are aware of our own intentions, the clarity of our

communication with others, and the real-world effects of our actions.

To be so, we must simultaneously critique and question our own

processes as we work. How do we engage with the world as process?

Here is a working model: suspend the state of unknowing, be aware of

how we operate as designers, and create a continuous cycle of listening

and expression.

SAR

A R

AFFO

/ G

RA

PH

IC D

ES

IGN

172

/ Sorted: Made by Me, You + the Stuff that Surrounds Us

INT

ER

IOR

AR

CH

ITE

CT

UR

E /

CH

RIS

TIN

E R

AN

KIN

173

/ Floral Charades

Constantly exposed to visual stimuli that are supplanted by new stimuli

at a dizzying pace, we gradually become desensitized, in need of

heightened visual effects to arouse our interest. Mass digital media

confuses our understanding of what is genuine; the natural often

looks artificial, and the notion of the natural is consequently blurred.

In the form of flowery asymmerical compositions, I make in the

same way that I perceive the natural world, rather than mimic its

appearance. My aim is to make pieces that nature is unlikely to create,

that surpass nature: exaggerated, theatrical, enhanced, humorous

versions of natural forms.


RU

TH R

EIFEN /

JEW

EL

RY

+ M

ET

AL

SM

ITH

ING

174

My work as an art educator stems from my roots as a teacher of young

adjudicated males, ages 13-20, who have been placed in a high security

facility for chronic violent offenders. Over the past four years, I have

seen art influence the most disengaged of learners. I educate with the

belief that youth who engage in art programming develop bonds with

positive role models, are more well rounded, “whole” people, have

higher self-esteem and a strengthened sense of identity. I believe that

youth who engage with art have greater success in school, are more

productive, and are less likely to engage in delinquent activity.

Subsequently, this growth affects the individual’s larger community

positively, especially within communities that struggle with

socioeconomic instability.

TE

AC

HIN

G +

LE

AR

NIN

G I

N A

RT

+ D

ES

IGN

/ A

NN

E R

EIN

HA

RD

T

175

/ Places of Pause

As owner of the object I view it as the beloved

As maker I view the object as material and subject matter

As artist I view the object as inspiration

As human I view the object as a symbol

As manufacturer I view the object for its function

As curator I view the object in relation to others

As scientist I view the object’s physical qualities and characteristics

As historian I view the concrete facts of the object and its past

As poet I view the objects whisperings

As a craftsman I view the object as humble


KEN

DA

LL REISS /

JEW

EL

RY

+ M

ET

AL

SM

ITH

ING

176

My work begins with the realization of a single discrepancy — a feeling

that something doesn’t quite fit — in a moment of silence, set in this

world. If I can pick through the chaos to find the momentary void,

I have found my beginning. Mapping creates an awareness of the hidden

latencies embedded in a place. I use the existing canvas to tease out and

layer architectural intervention. I am concerned with the social and

with the integration of landscapes. The goal is to learn and take from

the assemblage of small pieces that align to form a holistic work.

AR

CH

ITE

CT

UR

E /

CA

THA

RIN

E R

HA

177

/ FLF: By Kevinator

Through the medium of engraving, I create prints that document my

installation and sculptural work, as well as important moments in the

history of printmaking.

My engravings also explore a vocabulary of personal symbols in a

post-apocalyptic narrative. These allegorical tales probe the larger

subjects of modern communication and environmental damage, while

sifting through personal and autobiographical relationships such as

dislocation, memory loss, doubt, and creative confusion. Drawing

influence from the earliest printed books and works of science fiction,

these prints are sometimes accompanied by an invented text to afford

slower contemplation.


MA

RK

RICE /

PR

INT

MA

KIN

G

178

/ Rene Abythe & Fanfare


PR

INT

MA

KIN

G /

JO

HN

RO

MER

O

179

/ Transit Lounge (Assimilation Laboratory)

As a Rwandan living in Providence, RI, I configure ways of expressing

the in-between state of being stuck in a perpetual transit lounge.

Using humor bordering on the ridiculous, I engage complex narratives

to discuss issues of displacement, cultural adaptation, and what it

means to be an immigrant today. My work calls into question

assumptions around hybrid identity in this increasingly globalized

world. In exploring these issues, I fixate on the transitional material

of iron oxide to create a variety of sculptures, installations, prints,

and paintings. I juxtapose disparate components, suspending them

in space, to suggest geographical collision.


DU

HIR

WE R

USH

EMEZ

A /

PR

INT

MA

KIN

G

180

/ Weight of Wait: Repetition and Ritual in the Search for Equilibrium

Architecture is neither a hollow shell nor a static object. Today,

however, much of the “architecture” that is produced can be thought

of in these terms — houses so empty they read as mausoleums,

suburban developments lined up on a vast horizontal grid like grave-

stones . The space is not felt, the architecture not experienced, the

atmosphere not remembered. How then can architecture be internalized,

not just inhabited? Can architecture gain permanence in our mind

and the built landscape, achieving both personal and public

monumentality? How can architecture gain weight? Can architecture

be or convey light? Can architecture be in equilibrium, in the sense

that it can represent equally and simultaneously mass and ether —

life and death?

AR

CH

ITE

CT

UR

E /

BEN

JAM

IN S

AN

DEL

L

181

/ Popular Mechanics

Our culture charges images, objects, and phenomena with associative

values. This fundamental process is dramatically compounded

within art contexts. My work begins when I notice a thing in the world

that merges the associative and the art context in obvious, yet

paradoxical ways.

I take strong, loaded subjects and hollow them out, attempting to free

them from commonplace understandings. I complicate and coax

more open subjects toward metaphor and symbolic representation in

order to illuminate the particular and telling details that brought

them attention in the first place.


MICH

AEL SCH

REIB

ER /

PA

INT

ING

182

/ Process Book

In teaching art for the last two years, I have explored the question

of where artists get their inspiration. By helping my students see the

myriad possible answers, I hope to make art accessible to them and

show how it is already a part of their everyday lives. Recently, I have

been interested in looking closely at objects and places that are often

overlooked. By stopping and looking, we can make beautiful and

unexpected discoveries. Helping students make these discoveries and

realize how essential art is to our existence is what inspires me to teach.

TE

AC

HIN

G +

LE

AR

NIN

G I

N A

RT

+ D

ES

IGN

/ W

END

Y S

CHR

EIN

ER

183

/ Expressions of Intangible Culture

Skinny birch trees make a white column forest. A cleared space for

the hand, mind, and tongue. Out of site, see the water through the

screens. Extract the layers, then build them back. The Museum of

Intangible Culture. Gallery openings 2011, 2021, 2031 …

SAN

NA

SHA

H /

AR

CH

ITE

CT

UR

E

184

/ The Book in Translation

In this moment of transition from the page to the screen, our

relationship to books, both as objects and as texts, is changing.

A book is both finite and limitless. Its borders are clearly delineated,

yet it expands infinitely outward: through the turning of its pages,

through the act of reading, and through the connections made between

texts and readers across time.

In my work, books serve both as subject matter and form. I restore

the ephemeral into physical form, making abstract notions tactile.

I play in the liminal spaces, the moments when the page turns.

GR

AP

HIC

DE

SIG

N /

BEN

JAM

IN S

HA

YK

IN

185

/ Seven Seas Without

Inabilities

to be in two places at once,

to amalgamate experiences,

to be cognizant of my own biases.

And abilities,

to call more than one place my own,

to distinguish one from the other,

to recognize some of the biases others hold.

Of challenging and exploring the voids and brims of these dualities.

Of experiencing and grappling with borders and demarcations.

Of organizing, categorizing and defining both body and space.

In my practice I explore acts of clinging and assimilating, resisting

and mediating, including and eliminating. Working with photography,

video, and animation, I reference borders that are no longer just

physical, battles that are no longer just tactical, and displacements that

are no longer just personal.

AM

BER

EEN SID

DIQ

UI /

PH

OT

OG

RA

PH

Y

186

/ Dazzle Ships

Our culture has a great affinity for nomenclature. All things must be

named, ordered, catalogued, tagged, and defined. It is parametric;

establishing parameters is constant in all facets of life. But somewhere,

there is a moment, an emergence that preempts our inevitable need to

constrain. It is primordial and psychedelic. It is the unformed and the

undiscovered. This is my place. I want to protract that emergence and

record the trail of the wild and wonderful worms of light, color, mud,

and sound as they float away into an unnamable future: Dazzle Ships.


CE

RA

MIC

S /

ELI

SIM

ON

187

/ Absolution; Logic, Clay, Soul

Once upon a time a Passion crafted its own life on Earth.

It found that creation was a sensation of excitement and dynamic

challenges that ranged from physical pain to true joy. The tactility

of physical relationships with matter and energy became fascinating,

and this Energy began to play with ways to inspire feeling: energy

vibration, empowerment with material stability, and freedom/release

with ephemerality. These abundant experiences of creativity rose as

countless gifts of perspective, and this Soul asked questions of its

consciousness by creating itself over and over again in a multitude

of these reflections.

To this day you can find it at play in all the forms it may choose

to be, and all of its combined Essences find it truly awesome.


RO

SE SIMP

SON

/ C

ER

AM

ICS

188

/ Shift: From Something to Something Else

My approach to objects and material is restless and unconventional.

Sly, silly, rambunctious, deadpan, average. I like to create things that

possess the possibility of changing one’s perception, and discovering

unforeseen potential. I have a passion for old techniques such as joinery.

I contrast these old techniques with contemporary objects or ideas.

I like using found objects. I often apply the “right” material to the

“wrong” technique, or vice versa. I like to play with scale. When I work

outside, I often create sculptural interventions of minimal means in

public sites troubled with neglect. I interject humor or beauty in an

attempt to rejuvenate the site into a new experience. I am equally

concerned with where an object is, as opposed to what an object is.

I like the idea of touching someone artistically when they least expect

it. I sometimes group my indoor works in a salon style fashion,

allowing the work to project a collective voice. I like to keep things

physically simple and stripped down, but conceptually rich.


SC

UL

PT

UR

E /

CU

RTI

S SI

NG

MA

STER

189

/ Camera Obscura: Roger Williams Park

“He wrote me: We do not remember, we rewrite memory much as

history is rewritten. How can one remember thirst?

He wrote that he liked the fragility of those moments suspended

in time. Those memories whose only function had been to leave behind

nothing but memories.

He wrote: I’ve been round the world several times and now only

banality still interests me. On this trip I’ve tracked it with the

relentlessness of a bounty hunter.” — Chris Marker, Sans Soleil

AN

NE SLICK

/ A

RC

HIT

EC

TU

RE

190

/ Borderland

My eyes are closed and the sheets are cool. Pencil in hand, I begin

to drift and think. I am in between sleep and wakefulness. Flashes

of color, form, and memory play behind my closed eyes. They are stills

from my movie. I draw loosely and without fear or censor. This is

the most fruitful way and time for me to think. Upon waking, I look

at the jumble of lines and thoughts. I can work with it. I extract the

concepts and elements that interest me. I play, draw, sculpt, and

construct upon these initial quiet thoughts. This is the beginning.


FU

RN

ITU

RE

DE

SIG

N /

ALE

XA

ND

RA

SN

OO

K

191

/ Backsides Revealed

“Keith Spencer’s work radiates from my walls. It is no exaggeration to

say the best of his work possesses a profound energy that comes from

a remarkably unique and intense palette and a deep connection with the

subject matter, whether it’s the familiar landscape of the South Carolina

horse farm where he lives and paints, or the nudes, portraits, and

Indians that live even in his abstraction. He has earned his way to the

new and visionary work he creates that blurs the line between realism

and pure abstraction. His work is alive.”

—Owen Riley, photojournalist and art collector


KEITH

ALLY

N SP

ENCER

/ P

AIN

TIN

G

192

/ The Authorship of the Underground

My thesis is an investigation into the subsurface. The exchange

between the uniform or continuous surface exposes the ground below,

the essence of which reveals a truth. The singularity of the object

(surface) has a subtext or a composition (subsurface) which can relate

to the formation of the whole. This is not meant to study the accidental

exposure of the subsurface, but the systematic and deliberate

explorations of the underground. This exposure and engagement with

the ground below can be used as an impetus for future growth or

change within the dynamics surrounding the object. The question

becoming: How can the exploration and value of the underground

become apparent and useful to the surface? What becomes

the expression of the surface as composed by the impressions

of the subsurface?

LA

ND

SC

AP

E A

RC

HIT

EC

TU

RE

/ D

EMET

RIO

S ST

AU

RIN

OS

193

/ Definitively Indefinite or In Pursuit of Logical Questions

I am interested in two’s, pairings, comparisons, relationships,

contradictions, registration, bending, juxtaposition, duality, separation,

juxtaposition, illusion, and the space between.

MA

TTHEW

STEVEN

S / G

RA

PH

IC D

ES

IGN

194

/ Alzheimer’s Adult Day Care

Alzheimer’s Disease has become the biggest growth industry in chronic

care. ad is a frightening, irreversible, progressive brain disease that

slowly destroys memory and thinking skills and eventually the ability to

carry out simple tasks. Design can dramatically improve the way of life

and dignity for those who suffer from ad. My investigation and study

explores opportunities that include, but also go beyond, the immediate

fabric of the building in which those with Alzheimer’s are cared for.

I explore the use of sound, the resonance of music, and the vitality of

art to create a tranquil, sensual, poetic environment within which

inhabitants can feel at peace and secure.

INT

ER

IOR

AR

CH

ITE

CT

UR

E /

BEN

JAM

IN S

TEV

ENSO

N

195

/ What’s Red?

From my studio windows I can see figures from the outside world in

miniature; they enter buildings, have wild gesticulating conversations,

get in little cars and drive erratically. Their little world is as distant to

me as a film or puppet show. I am separated from it, yet experience it

as a known reality. My interpretation is my only experience, my

imagination of which fills in the gaps, and is ultimately all I can “know.”

Are we not always constructing and projecting? Is that not a fiction?

And is that not what makes art have effect at all?


PH

OEB

E STUB

BS /

GL

AS

S

196

/ With Breathless Expectation

The body is a tool, an instrument that plays a critical role in the

interactions of our daily lives; it is our threshold for contact and

communication with self, others, and the environment.

How do we treat ourselves, and how does our body treat us in return?

My objects and environments examine the notion of body as other.

Sculptures allude to a physical understanding of what we know as the

body, but suggest something gone awry. I investigate psychological and

physical conditions as temporal experiences that elicit pleasure and

pain. Familiarity becomes awkwardness and discomfort, questioning

the truth of imperfection.


.

CE

RA

MIC

S /

ELI

ZA

BET

H S

UEL

LEN

TRO

P

197

/ Rules: An Exploration in Landscape Architecture

The main goal of my thesis is to discuss the aesthetic and philosophical

values of the rules in landscape architectural design. The narrative is

based on practice and methodology as well as on an understanding

of rules from an abstract point of view. Knowledge of rules in sociology

and philosophy also guides the design process.

WEN

HA

O SU

N /

LA

ND

SC

AP

E A

RC

HIT

EC

TU

RE

198

/ A Call to Arms

“The memory of the pre-colonial period is still very much alive in

the villages. Mothers still hum to their children the songs which

accompanied the warriors as they set off to fight the colonizer.

At the age of twelve or thirteen the young villagers know by heart

the names of the elders who took part in the last revolt, and the

dreams in the douars and villages are not those of the children

in the cities dreaming of luxury goods or passing their exams but

dreams of identification with such and such a hero whose heroic

death still brings tears to their eyes.”

—Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth


DIG

ITA

L +

ME

DIA

/ L

AU

RA

SW

AN

SON

199

/ Design Future History

My work is a meditation on transformations to memory occasioned by

media. How have memory-bearing technologies imposed order on

knowledge? How does the formal ordering of knowledge influence the

stories re/constructed from remnants of the past? I use design to make

observations on the evolution of mnemonic techniques, developing

a theory of digital temporality separate from the experience of past and

present in the physical world. I build tools that require more

conscientious interactions with new media. I provide strategies for

designers to more rigorously interrogate media and a methodological

framework for the designer as “future historian” — the gatekeeper

between past actuality and potential representation.

ERIK

A TA

RTE /

GR

AP

HIC

DE

SIG

N

200

/ Traverse — Design & Reflection in Public Spaces

At once bare and over-saturated, mute and overpoweringly loud,

repulsive and seductive, the city is a place of surplus amenities,

experiences, and chance encounters. I view the city as existing between

the decentralized, fluid, and stochastic nature of memory and the highly

static nature of the museum that archives, articulates in space, and

makes legible memories of a culture. The overlaying narratives

and serendipitous relationships make the city at once dynamic and

exciting, but also illegible and resistant to representation.

I traverse, research, read, and write in the spaces of the city in order

to understand how narratives are communicated there.

GR

AP

HIC

DE

SIG

N /

DIM

ITR

Y T

ETIN

201

/ Process Book

The education system plays an undeniable role in child development.

Teaching enables me to tangibly convey an often overlooked truth:

throughout our history, the creative arts has played a role in every part

of the education system. I find that when visual arts are integrated into

the classroom and arts educators work in conjunction with academic

educators, a child receives a more well-rounded and enriched education.

The collaborative conversations that happen in the art classroom

develop a child’s ability to problem-solve and cooperate.

AM

Y TISCH

LER /

TE

AC

HIN

G +

LE

AR

NIN

G IN

AR

T +

DE

SIG

N

202

/ In Between: Forming Dialogue

My proposed program calls for three guest houses to allow visiting

scholars to stay and study at the Gropius House, an architectural icon

in Lincoln, MA. The contour lines, which form the basis of the

addition’s morphology, describe a relationship between the exterior

envelope and interior layout of spaces. Variation of the topography

correlates with the progression of the interior spaces. The constant

interaction between entities replaces the critique of the edge, creating

an architectural dialogue that is primarily driven by circulation.

The addition creates a new landscape that responds to the existing

site and extends programmatic function.

AR

CH

ITE

CT

UR

E /

SA

LLY

TO

203

/ Suspended Harvest: Smog Farming in Mexico City

Can a deployable, adaptable, architecturally augmented infrastructure

remediate our environment? How can a biotic system infiltrate and

armor our social and dwelling spaces?

Toward a thick(er) skin and a new hybridity. Mexico City:

In a hyper-dense urbanity there is no choice but to build among.

Thus: an intervention that hinges between Spanish baroque, modernism,

and a visceral horticulture, between relics and the almost-imagined.

It gleans and processes what is most plentiful in the d.f.: pm10,

aka, smog.


COLLEEN

TUITE /

LA

ND

SC

AP

E A

RC

HIT

EC

TU

RE

204

/ Ours: Enabling and Inspiring Collaborative Consumption

Through design, I strive to facilitate transformative experiences

that reveal opportunities to foster social, economic, and

environmental change.

My approach focuses on the creation of experiential scenarios that

promote collective action amongst groups of individuals. Through

iterative explorations, I design quiet probes to enable participatory

solutions that activate users to co-produce benefits. Face-to-face

interactions reinforce our social fabric and enable us to work together

to create positive change.

My thesis explores collaborative consumption — alternative forms

of consumerism rooted in sharing. Collaborative consumption is

reshaping the way we own things, allowing us to consume together,

reduce our impact on the planet, and enhance social capital within

our communities through the redefinition of value in products,

services, and systems.


IND

US

TR

IAL

DE

SIG

N /

EM

ILY

TU

TEU

R

205

/ Glimpse

sometimes you might catch your breath, sucking in at the delicacy of

lacy patterns and lines. sometimes you might just wonder, how is this

caulk? it can be cream and white and blush so soft. black spikes look

wet. a glimpse into refinement. edible. haute couture. fetish. embroidery.

elegantly weird in a motley confusion of materiality and worth. a blur of

references, ideas, and textures coalesce into an aesthetic that responds

to both making and wearing. transposing simple with ornate, modernity

with history and the handmade. irreverent. subversive. teasing. colliding.


MA

RIA

H TU

TTLE / JE

WE

LR

Y +

ME

TA

LS

MIT

HIN

G

206

/ Ex-porting Land

Ex-porting Land is situated in Maldives, the lowest-lying country in

the world. With 80% of its land under one meter above sea level,

this island nation is facing two catastrophic threats: the global rising

sea level is contesting Maldives with its lack of habitable land, and

the rising population density threatens the native coral reefs.

My project is conceived as a provocation and speculation on how

these two demands can be hybridized as an alternative to the migration

proposal suggested by the Maldivian President. Instead of abandoning

the precious natural and cultural heritage, a new form of symbiotic

ecology is proposed.

AR

CH

ITE

CT

UR

E /

MA

N C

HU

N U

N

207

/ On Make Believe & Madness: An Interview with Myselves

I imagine that most people feel “typed” at times. People live in spheres

that reinforce certain behaviors or modes of being and inhibit others.

I suppose I try to highlight that by creating (or implying) spaces

and people that don’t quite fit in or make sense. I create installations,

animations, and character-based performances to serve this purpose.

They highlight a gap between real life (whatever that is) and one’s

desires, and they imply that both realities can exist in the same person

or place at any given moment.

KR

ISTEN VA

N LIEW

/ S

CU

LP

TU

RE

208

/ Process Book: Connecting Art + Design Education to Our Everyday World

Art education is exploring the growing possibilities of an idea:

students should be granted the freedom to find out what they are

capable of and how they can make a change. Currently, I teach

elementary school, and soon, I will be teaching high school. The

excitement and curiosity I see in the classroom inspires a plethora

of student artwork. Included in my lesson plans are art projects

exploring close encounters, mapping and place-based design, and

drawing. I want to help students connect art with their daily

lives, as well as teach them how places and things overlooked can

be turned into visual narratives.

TE

AC

HIN

G +

LE

AR

NIN

G I

N A

RT

+ D

ES

IGN

/ T

AN

YA V

AZ

IRA

NI

209

/ Bio-Curious: A Series of Graphic Experiments

A leaf falls and slowly decays, leaving only the pith. Ice crystals

aggregate in delicate strands across a pane of glass. A neuron fires as

you read these words, sending out tiny pulses of electricity which

spread through your brain in an intricate web. While apparently

disparate, these events share a common systemic underpinning. There

is a compositional grammar and order underlying every aspect of

the natural world. In my work, I court the unexpected. I use seemingly

wild yet highly ordered natural phenomena as lenses to view my

own practice and as creative prompts to conceive new methodological

and formal approaches to graphic design.

OLIV

IA V

ERD

UG

O /

GR

AP

HIC

DE

SIG

N

210

/ Subtle Bodies, Subtle Selves

My thesis project is meant to depict an internal landscape where

thoughts and emotions rise and fall in a continuum of inner experience.

There are five textiles in the group, each based loosely on one of the

five koshas of Vedanta: Anandamaya Kosha, the sheath of bliss,

Vijnanamaya Kosha, the sheath of wisdom, Manamaya Kosha, the

sheath of mind, Pranamaya Kosha, the sheath of prana, and Anamaya

Kosha, the sheath of food. Gesture, color, texture, and material

play a central role in suggesting these elusive yet distinct states

of consciousness.


TE

XT

ILE

S /

NA

THA

N V

OIR

OL

211

/ Heirloom

I explore my family history through textiles, using pattern, color, and

material to infuse personal memories and stories with visual narrative.

Each textile is meant to explore one of the different ways a location or

moment contains my family’s heritage—from the blurred dreamscapes

of childhood to retold stories of my mother’s transient life. Color, fabric

and line describe these experiences and allow the lives and places past

to emerge.

Importantly, I envision my work as an installation, where the viewer

encounters each textile piece and enters its history.


ERIC M

ALIK

WA

GEN

SEIL / T

EX

TIL

ES

212

/ A Flight of Fantasy: FirstWorks New Art Center and Creative Culture Revival in Providence

“Culture, and by extension the creative industry, is a key element in

urban redevelopment.” —Paul Rutten

My thesis project embraces and illustrates Rutten’s viewpoint through

the adaptive reuse of an existing space to design a new art center

for FirstWorks, an energetic arts organization in Providence. The

project reevaluates how design can define the organization’s identity,

which serves as a center of hospitality, vitality, and creativity.

The proposed art center contains a performing art space, a visual art

space, galleries, and a multifunctional public plaza to support various

cultural events. It also provides public leisure and artistic activities to

encourage mass participation and easy continual observation.

INT

ER

IOR

AR

CH

ITE

CT

UR

E /

CH

IA-M

IN W

AN

G

213

/ Reconnection

Where do you see boundaries affecting our reality? You see them

everywhere. When you walk into a building, there is a relationship

between the ceiling, beams, and columns. These elements are

interconnected. At the same time, each plays its own role. Its separate

function and interface defines its boundaries. For example, the wall

is the boundary of a room. The surface of a building is the boundary

between the inside and outside. When you walk into Manhattan’s

Central Park, the gardens and lawns define the boundaries and

functions of the space. At a larger scale, the boundaries of countries

endow different regions with different meanings.

TON

G W

AN

G /

LA

ND

SC

AP

E A

RC

HIT

EC

TU

RE

214

/ Re_MAKING: Operations on a Grid

I am interested in how architecture reveals the situation it exists within,

and the conditions it has come from. In my work, I appropriate these

conditions. I explore making as a set of operations performed on an

existing structure. Architecture for me exists in the connections that

materialize form, space, and order.

AR

CH

ITE

CT

UR

E /

CH

RIS

TOP

HER

WH

ITE

215

/ Trans — The Architecture of Beyond

this is a Master’s thesis in which trans-

parency is looked at as a construction

inherent to the built world and by

organization, orders information

about a place through connective

transparent thresholds and volumes.

BEN

JAM

IN W

ILLIAM

S / A

RC

HIT

EC

TU

RE

216

/ Design Agency

As part of a collaborative thesis investigation, Jane Androski (see p.52)

and I designed and taught the graduate course Design Agency—a small

attempt to transform the way we approached socially engaged practice

within our own institution.

The course provides a parallel support structure for graduate students

from across the design disciplines to examine the systems within which

they work, to develop a consciousness about the way they communicate,

and to do so in service to community. As an ongoing practice, it’s a way

for each of us to more consciously align our skills as designers with our

values as people.

GR

AP

HIC

DE

SIG

N /

EM

ILY

SA

RA

WIL

SON

217

/ A Sound Mind in a Sound Body: Working & Living Space for Senior Artists

I believe that aging should not stop the passion for creativity and artistic

endeavors. Instead, aging should be embraced. Therefore, I propose the

construction of an experimental senior artists’ community where we can

research how an interior architectural space involves and influences the

aging process.

Those elderly who lack mental and physical stimulation deteriorate

more rapidly. I propose their housing be designed to enhance an active

artistic lifestyle and provide a space where creative mental and physical

activities can be performed daily.

JING

HU

A W

U /

INT

ER

IOR

AR

CH

ITE

CT

UR

E

218

/ Uniqueness in Landscape: From Village to Factory

At a moment when certain cities and territories race to assert their

economic strength, new scales of industry have emerged. Many of the

resulting urban environments have proved to be inhospitable to their

recently urbanized inhabitants. To introduce sub-landscapes that recall

the village of memory may ease the process of transition.

My thesis is the redesign of “street life” in the factory, an effort

to re-guide people’s daily routine, providing spaces of dynamic

exchange, where they can release stress and gain a sense of belonging

within the factory.

LA

ND

SC

AP

E A

RC

HIT

EC

TU

RE

/ X

IAO

WEN

WU

219

/ Space in Between

The spaces in between communities and neighborhoods lead to physical

and cultural disconnects. As a result, the opportunity to share different

cultural, historical, social, and educational resources could be lost.

How can landscape architects provide a shared space for the “spaces

in between?” How can they bridge people of different ages, educational

levels, and disciplines? How can diverse groups express, communicate,

and exchange their knowledge and interests?

How can landscape architects physically and culturally bridge isolated

communities and neighborhoods? How can different communities

have a sense of ownership to express who they are and what they can

do in this shared space?

JIE YU

/ L

AN

DS

CA

PE

AR

CH

ITE

CT

UR

E

220

/ Crossing Point

The “crossing point” refers to the moment when one element crosses

another. In architecture, it refers to a place where one program

encounters another, activating layers and spatial hierarchy to trigger

attention and emotion. My work strives to introduce another space

typology (the bike rental) to a hospitality space in order to create an

interesting architectural crossing point that stimulates the interaction

between people, especially strangers.

INT

ER

IOR

AR

CH

ITE

CT

UR

E /

KA

REN

ZH

AN

G

221

/ Using Art Museum Collections and Practice in Interdisciplinary, Holistic, and Engaging Learning Models

My work as a museum educator, learning facilitator, discussion

prompter, and creator of wonder is grounded and rooted in two

main ideas:

1. Art is created as a byproduct of personal, societal, cultural, and

philosophical ideas, experiences, and experiments. Art is the most

impressive impression of a zeitgeist.

2. The act of questioning, researching, wondering about, and

inquiring into painting, photographs, sculptures, collages, drawings,

prints, and architecture produces creative, critical, interested, and

communicative life-long learners.

KA

THER

INE Z

ISKIN

/ T

EA

CH

ING

+ L

EA

RN

ING

IN A

RT

+ D

ES

IGN

224

INDEXARCHITEC TURE

Jared Brown 66

Nicholas Buehrens 68

Caroline Chou 77

Van Hong Chu 78

Martin Cline 80

Reed Duecy-Gibbs 85

David Fersh 90

Ethan French 96

Leilei Gao 99

Shih-Hwa Hung

Taigo Itadani 116

Ai Ito 117

Thomas Jonak 120

Alexander Keller 125

Youngkyung Kim 128

William Kimmerle 131

Bradley Kisicki 132

Ada Tak Ko 134

Brittney Kailese Kroon 136

Edward Laemmel 139

Shinah Lee 141

Carol Ann Livingstone 146

Sherataun Nuss 157

Catharine Rha 174

Benjamin Sandell 178

Sanna Shah 181

Anne Slick 187

Sally To 200

Man Chun Un 204

Christopher White 212

Benjamin Williams 213

CER AMICS

Lee Johnson 119

Jason Pacheco 159

Benjamin Peterson 164

Eli Simon 184

Rose Simpson 185

Elizabeth Suellentrop 194

DIGITAL + MEDIA

Derek Paul Boyle 63

Han-Shen Chen 74

Kyong-Sub Do 84

Rohini Gosain 104

Byeongwon Ha 108

Jason Huff 114

Benjamin Kennedy 126

Yasimin Kunz 138

Jae Ok Lee 142

Mikhail Mansion 149

Justin Phillipson 165

Laura Swanson 196

FURNITURE DESIGN

Jo-Fan Chang 73

Andrew Kopp 135

Ryan Murray 156

Alexandra Snook 188

GL ASS

Alexandra Ben-Abba 60

Phoebe Stubbs 193

GR APHIC DESIGN

Salem Al-Qassimi 50

Jane Androski 52

Marc Choi 75

Hope Chu 79

Eliza Fitzhugh 92

Jessica Greenfield 105

Lynn Kiang 127

Seung Chan Lim 145

Sara Raffo 169

Benjamin Shaykin 182

Matthew Stevens 191

Erika Tarte 197

Dimitry Tetin 198

Olivia Verdugo 207

Emily Sara Wilson 214

INDUSTRIAL DESIGN

Audrey L. Barnes 55

Elizabeth Becton 58

Gunther Chanange 72

Camilla Fucili 97

Elaine Yuri Fukuda 98

Stephan Goetschius 103

Christina Kazakia 124

Na Ree Kim 129

Calvin Ku 137

Emily Tuteur 202

INTERIOR ARCHITEC TURE

Sang Hee An 51

Jordan Bissett 61

Henry Hyung Min Choi 76

Chad Echols 86

Jessica Fanning 89

Boback Firoozbakht 91

Sarah Frank 95

Brady Gunnell 107

Cyndia Hsu 113

Seung Hwan Hwang 118

Seo Yeon Jin 118

Hogil Jung 121

Kayla Soo-Youn Kim 130

Lisa Klinger 133

Aran Lee 143

Jung Eun Lee 144

Abigail Luley 147

Jae Hyun Park 162

Christine Rankin 170

Benjamin Stevenson 192

Chalermsak Tantipanitkool

Chia-Min Wang 210

Jinghua Wu 215

Karen Zhang 218

JEWELRY + METALSMITHING

Katherine Chase Peters 163

Ruth Reifen 171

Kendall Reiss 173

Mariah Tuttle 203

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE

Ryan Castro 70

Maria Debye-Saxinger 82

Lu Gao 100

Arianne Gelardin 102

Scott MacDonald 148

Lauren Meena 153

Ponnapa Prakkamakul 167

Ian Quate 168

Demetrios Staurinos 190

Wenhao Sun 195

Colleen Tuite 201

Tong Wang 211

Xiaowen Wu 216

Jie Yu 217

PAINTING

Katherine Bell 59

Corydon Cowansage 81

Collin Hatton 110

Anina Field Kallop 122

Nell Painter 160

Anna Plesset 166

Michael Schreiber 179

Keith Allyn Spencer 189

PHOTOGR APHY

Jordan Baumgarten 56

Michael Brandes 64

Mimi Cabell 69

Jennifer Cawley 71

Jennifer Garza-Cuen 101

Omer Hecht 111

Michael Mergen 154

Ambereen Siddiqui 183

PRINTMAKING

Hae Min Choi

Emilia Edwards 87

Stefan Gunn 106

David May 150

Ryan McIntosh 151

Lauren Pakradooni 161

Mark Rice 175

John Romero 176

Duhirwe Rushemeza 177

SCULP TURE

Jake Beckman 57

Johnathan Derry 83

Crystal Ellis 88

Darren Foote 93

James Foster 94

Curtis Singmaster 186

Kristen van Liew 205

TEACHING + LEARNING

IN ART+ DESIGN

Laura Atchinson 53

Kristen Boyd 62

Blair Brendli 65

Katharine Brummett 67

Beth Clevenstine

Cassandra Foral

Jennifer Kallus 123

Kirsten McNally 152

Christina Miles 155

Allison Pace 158

Anne Reinhardt 172

Wendy Schreiner 180

Amy Tischler 199

Tanya Vazirani 206

Katherine Ziskin 219

TEX TILES

Anastasia Azure 54

Rico A. Harris 109

Vedrana Hrsak 112

Elizabeth Lamb 140

Nathan Voirol 208

Eric Malik Wagenseil 209

RHODE ISLAND SCHOOL OF DESIGN

GRADUATE CLASS OF 2011

Architecture

Ceramics

Digital + Media

Furniture Design

Glass

Graphic Design

Industrial Design

Interior Architecture

Jewelry + Metalsmithing

Landscape Architecture

Painting

Photography

Printmaking

Sculpture

Teaching + Learning in Art + Design

Textiles

RGB11: RISD Grad Book 2011

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Transcript of RGB11: RISD Grad Book 2011