Digital Gaze, Reena Chai What does gaze mean in a digital context? As theoretical and visual research, this thesis project integrates cultural observation with graphic design to seek to understand digital gazing. Gaze is a social act of looking that involves more than mere literal vision, one that signals a passage of implicit dimensions with conceptual entanglements between viewer and subject. To prevent reducing the concept of the gaze into a narrow meaning, I examine the topic from three different frameworks: Gazing Others, Gaze as Power, and Gazing the Self.
︎︎︎Visit the Thesis Dossier
Climate Resistance and Resilience, Shannon Lee
Winner of Research/Scholarship Sustainability Award, 2022 School of Design for Social Justice and Sustainability Awards
Climate change is a concept that is profoundly difficult to relate. Oftentimes, analytical angles fail to capture the magnitude of crisis. This project documents an effort to represent our cultural response to climate change as the amorphous “hyperobject” in order to arrive at a more complete understanding. Much like other calamaties that appear in the 24-hour news cycle, our ordinary consumption of the climate crisis is reduced to a mere spectacle. Mainstream media serves to ‘other’ and distance what is harsh, lived, and felt reality for many across the world, while reinforcing our sense of status and safety.
My project aims to combat traditional means of information dissemination, which frequently serve to neutralize critical observation. More broadly, I hope to find meaning in the despair of these looming crisis by communicating difficult emotions like loss, grief, and fear in a shared space. By collectively and publicly recognizing loss, we take a necessary step in confronting the Anthropocene's realities and the impossibility of maintaining business as usual.
︎︎︎Visit the Thesis Dossier
Climate change is a concept that is profoundly difficult to relate. Oftentimes, analytical angles fail to capture the magnitude of crisis. This project documents an effort to represent our cultural response to climate change as the amorphous “hyperobject” in order to arrive at a more complete understanding. Much like other calamaties that appear in the 24-hour news cycle, our ordinary consumption of the climate crisis is reduced to a mere spectacle. Mainstream media serves to ‘other’ and distance what is harsh, lived, and felt reality for many across the world, while reinforcing our sense of status and safety.
My project aims to combat traditional means of information dissemination, which frequently serve to neutralize critical observation. More broadly, I hope to find meaning in the despair of these looming crisis by communicating difficult emotions like loss, grief, and fear in a shared space. By collectively and publicly recognizing loss, we take a necessary step in confronting the Anthropocene's realities and the impossibility of maintaining business as usual.
︎︎︎Visit the Thesis Dossier
Preservation and Decay, Rue Yunru Qian
Humans have an intrinsic need to preserve the corporeal existence of things. From an individual's collection of a fragile stamp to the collective protection of an endangered species, the human need and desire for preservation always exists. The action of preservation reflects human’s effort to prevent things from changing, decaying, dying, or other unfavorable states resulting from not-preserving.
My thesis project is devoted to uncover the dichotomy between preserving and not-preserving by visualizing, analyzing, and ultimately questioning such dichotomy through multiple layers of analysis and interpretation. The research process revolves around three scopes, human as individual, human as community and human as species. Various research methods are applied in this process, including literature review, cultural probes, ethnography etc. that contribute to the content of my design experiments. I aim to present and propose to my audience with an alternative perspective to evaluate the duality of this either-or choice: preserving or not-preserving, and eventually recognize the supreme power resting in both of them when they intertwine.
︎︎︎Visit the Thesis Dossier
Humans have an intrinsic need to preserve the corporeal existence of things. From an individual's collection of a fragile stamp to the collective protection of an endangered species, the human need and desire for preservation always exists. The action of preservation reflects human’s effort to prevent things from changing, decaying, dying, or other unfavorable states resulting from not-preserving.
My thesis project is devoted to uncover the dichotomy between preserving and not-preserving by visualizing, analyzing, and ultimately questioning such dichotomy through multiple layers of analysis and interpretation. The research process revolves around three scopes, human as individual, human as community and human as species. Various research methods are applied in this process, including literature review, cultural probes, ethnography etc. that contribute to the content of my design experiments. I aim to present and propose to my audience with an alternative perspective to evaluate the duality of this either-or choice: preserving or not-preserving, and eventually recognize the supreme power resting in both of them when they intertwine.
︎︎︎Visit the Thesis Dossier
Living Mirrors, Han Zhang
︎︎︎Visit the Thesis Dossier