Catalog
Alexa Mauzy-Lewis
MA in Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism | New School for Social Research
Ancestry and You: The Design of Belonging | “Ancestry and You: The Design of Belonging” is examination of consumer genetic testing and how the “design” of identity – as manifested through Ancestry.com’s testing kit, corporate branding, web resources, reports, and advertisements – masks the messiness and ambiguity of family ties and self-definition. Recounting my own fraught engagement with the service, this multimedia project mixes criticism and memoir. As a supplement to my thesis work in the Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism program at The New School for Social Research, portions of this material are sourced from my forthcoming nonfiction essay, “Between Water and Blood.” | Link to Project | http://www.alexamauzylewis.xyz
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Alifiya Mutaher, Anjali Nair, Judy Park Lee, Miliaku Nwabueze and Raissa Xie
MFA in Transdisciplinary Design | Parsons School of Design, The New School
Relationshifts & The Struggle of Post Work Imagining | Using a combination of design and auto-ethnographic methods, this project imagines fragmentary futures in which wage labour no longer exists. Each speculation explores a different facet of life affected by capitalist work culture, such as living structures, linguistic hierarchies, kinship, and time. Rather than propose large-scale changes to the economy, the speculations turn a critical eye toward our own relationships to work and one another, suggesting the everyday shifts needed to move toward desired futures. Thus, we argue that futures design is inextricable from the designers’ experiences and situated knowledges, offering an imaginative process for surfacing and unsettling those entrenched beliefs. | Link to Virtual Gallery | Link to Video, password: "postwork" | Alifiya Portfolio | Anjali Portfolio | Miliaku Portfolio
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Anna Gedal
MA in Media Studies | The New School
Towards A Transparent Methodology | This is my mapped MA thesis research as of April 5, 2021. It is, and will always be, incomplete and in process. It will never be done because, for one, I can't read everything and, more importantly, there is so much that can never be found—that was never recorded or even considered worthy of preservation. There is so much that was already, in the words of scholar Saidiya Hartman, “lost to the archive.” Through this exercise, I seek to reflect on what I'm learning, interrogate how these epistemes are organized, who has access to them, and where I'm finding/unearthing them. | Link to project | Link to Portfolio
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Anne Comer
MA in Anthropology | The New School for Social Research
Thomas Cole National Historic Site: Virtual Tour | I worked with the Thomas Cole National Historic Site and interactive tour company, Vivid Media to create a virtual tour while I was a research fellow at the Thomas Cole National Historic Site in Catskill, New York. Inspiration for the tour came from exploring the site's physical layout and recording visitor feedback, drawing from ethnographic field methods. Our objective was to make the site accessible to the public during a global pandemic. The tour's design is fluid and can be updated to reflect future site initiatives. | Link to Virtual Tour
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Ara Ortiz
PhD in Anthropology | Brandeis University
Undocumented Histories Archive | UHA is a multi-modal archive that is centrally concerned with questions of visibility and representation as it pertains to public engagement with undocumented and immigrant rights organizing. This project uses multi-modality and design as channels that can bring forth representation to actors and movements whose rights are withheld while using safeguards to obfuscate digital state surveillance. Additionally, it utilizes visual and vocal anonymization techniques as both theoretical and practical interventions to disrupt what ethnographic and public representation can mean for demographics for whom visibility is weaponized against them. | Link to Project
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Aryana Ghazi-Hessami
PhD in Anthropology | The New School for Social Research
MyKali: Front Covers | MyKali is the Arab world's leading openly queer webzine. This essay offers a visual and discourse analysis of MyKali's use of visual media, specifically front cover design, to craft out a new space for queer life in the SWANA region to flourish. | Link to Project
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ayodamola okunseinde, teresa braun
MA in Anthropology | The New School for Social Research
.dermis. | Dermis, a sacra collective project, is a collection of immersive virtual reality meditations that investigate skin as an object of anthropological study. We invite participants to explore a virtual skin-scape and reflect on the skin as the border between private and public experiences of self, a site of social constructs, and as a permeable membrane prone to injury and scarring. | Link to Project | http://sacracollective.com/
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Benny Zhang
MFA in Design & Technology | Parsons School of Design
Cyber Ikebana | The ultimate goal of Cyber Ikebana is to trigger viewers’ emotions and reflection on our surrounding environment. By combining the beauty of floral objects and artificial materials, I would like to invite viewers to interact with my recreation of a traditional artform: Ikebana, encouraging them to further reflect on how human and non-human subjects situate in the Anthropocene.| Link to Project
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Bettine Josties
PhD in Sociology | The New School for Social Research
Transversing Zoom | My project, Transversing Zoom, brings together anthropology and design in that it explores the relation between human bodies and digital communication interfaces, in this case Zoom, through a series of experiments that have been conducted within the context of Zoom class meetings in the fall of 2020. The goal of the experiments was to playfully engage with but also to question and undermine the unspoken socio-technical rules that govern the inhabitation of Zoom class meetings. They have been recorded from a variety of perspectives (Zoom Speaker View, Zoom Gallery View, and hand camera recordings) and made accessible to an audience in the form of a 15-minute audio-visual experimental video. | Link to Project
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Bhavya Gupta
MFA in Design and Technology | The New School, Parsons
Unheard Voices: Artifacts from the field | Unheard Voices is a mixed-media storytelling platform focused on the migrant women workers in India that were affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. It incorporates the qualitative stories of migrant women and quantitative fieldwork data that are brought together in the form of a narrative map that contains interviews, audio recordings, and demographic visuals. This is a collection of the fieldwork artifacts from my ongoing MFA Design and Technology thesis that I have collected for the ADX Conference. | Link to Project | https://bhavyag.com/
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Chantal Meng
PhD in Media, Communications and Cultural Studies | Goldsmiths, University of London
How to See Darkness in a New Light | There is a growing challenge of how we perceive darkness in the urban night and various ideas on how to deal with it — most likely through artificial light. But how could we advocate for the aesthetics of nocturnal darkness? Especially when a majority of society does not even know what is disappearing. With my camera, I observe the visuality of the presence of urban darkness which I suggest requires further attention. | Link to Project | https://www.chantalmeng.com
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Clara Beccaro
MA in Anthropology | The New School for Social Research
Eye- Contact | Eye-Contact takes seriously matters brought forth by the ontological turn—moving away from the idea that different world-views are mere representational differences, it creates a space to consider the existence of and interact with different worlds. Particularly, Eye-Contact—as a piece of speculative design—is embedded in the anthropology of care. Focusing on the experience of people with Alzheimer’s, and their caretakers, Eye-Contact functions as an invitation to grapple with « care » beyond its curative and biomedical deployments. Altogether, Eye-Contact is concerned with opening up new horizons to imagine how conditions that are lived unequally—such as Alzheimer’s—can nonetheless be shared through practices of care that foster interdependency and reciprocity. | Link to Project
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Clemente de Althaus
MA in Anthropology | The New School for Social Research
Catalyst | This project is called Catalyst because it is a device designed to help the reader break from preconceptions of a one-way-world, rethinking and reshaping relationships between property and modernity. It consists of provocative stories that portrait alternative engagements between fictional communities and the demands of a modern and globalized world. It’s also called Catalyst because the non-linear, speculative design process that I followed, guided by the CW&M class, allowed me to break down problematic assumptions (often unquestioned by the “solution-focused” mindset) and move more freely between uncertainty and experimentation. The objective of these stories isn't to make a statement about a particular formula, but just to spark, to catalyze, in the reader's imagination new possibilities that could contribute to a "many-way-world" view. | Link to Project
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Collin McClain
BA/MA in the School of Public Engagement/ BPATS | The New School
Exchange Points | This is a story about systems value, the networks they imply, and the implications for the nature of money – seen through the points at which we exchange goods and services for representations of value. I ask if our infrastructures of transaction create the world of value we want or if a redesign is possible. | Link to Project
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Diana Chun
Masters of Design | School of Design/Design for Interactions, Carnegie Mellon University
Thesis Advisor: Kristin Hughes
Co-designing Ethnographic Inquiry | My thesis utilizes both Design and Anthropology disciplines’ methods and ideologies to co-design with a socio-economically underserved community near Pittsburgh, PA to come up with participatory way to distribute a donation grant. As I close down my year-long thesis project, I want to share 3 ways how you might use design in ethnographic inquiry. | Link to Project | https://www.dianaminjichun.com/
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Elif Gecyatan
MA in Anthropology | The New School for Social Research
Svart Låda | I started this project to clarify how a human face becomes a coded filter and goes through ontological change. I am aiming to be part of the discussions and critiques of how facial recognition technologies formalize, quantify, classify, and reinforce the historical ways of discrimination and existing forms of social inequality. To do that, I have taken digital social media filters, their augmented reality technologies, and "read them backward." Taking IKEA shipping logistics as a metaphor with this “Svart Låda" (black box in Swedish) called D.I.Y kit I am aiming to think through facial recognition software and its black box. My goal was to create an interactive piece that would show the process to the users while creating spaces for conversation and open the possibility for new forms of refusal to algorithmic oppression (Noble, 2018). | Link to Project | https://www.elifgecyatan.com/
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Fareeha Shah
MA in Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism | The New School
Human Algorithm: Mapping Intimate Space | This project is a phenomenological exploration of the spaces I have occupied, drawing from time and memory to create an experiential, participatory narrative. Using a series of illustrations, the work guides the participant through a series of experiences. The writing includes original short stories, vignettes, creative nonfiction, and excerpts from critical theory, literature, and other media. The final product will take the form of an experimental graphic novel, with a print and digital edition. | Link to Project | https://www.instagram.com/phantasmareeha/?hl=en
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Gabby Vazquez
MA in Anthropology | The New School for Social Research
Diasporican Queens| Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and costume, Diasporican Queens is a multidisciplinary research project with intentions of addressing Puerto Rican identity within U.S pageant systems, the difficulties of navigating the performativity of pageants as cultural sites, and the Indigenous politics that arise through U.S land analysis and Puerto Rico’s diasporic complexities. Diasporican Queens hones in on pageant queens with ties to both the U.S and Puerto Rico whose ancestries overlap with historical Indigenous tribal crossovers as a result of imperialism and forced migrations, specifically those identifying with the Taíno Nation who reside on lands outside of “Latin” America. | Link to Project
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Gabriela Karolak
MFA in Transdisciplinary Design | Parsons School of Design, The New School
Smart Cities Slime Mold | The project I am working on is for a future design class themed "Smart Cities". What I have been exploring so far with this project is the redefinition of what "smart" and "city" mean. It is a speculative project that aims to question, reimagine and potentially inspire a more thoughtful and positive approach to city planning. Starting off, I question the meaning of "Smart" and the connotations people give to the word. Smart is oftentimes associated with science, mathematics, logic etc; a very Western approach. I have been really fascinated in exploring the other/alternative manifestations of smartness and knowledges. The exemplary manifestations are "semi-intelligent" organisms like ocean bacteria that create neuron-like connections and communicate between each other, the social life of plants (it's been discovered that plants and trees, in fact, express social behaviours and care, nurture and defend each other); or animal instincts. For this project I have decided to focus on experimenting with slime mould- a one-cell organism that - in some way - is capable of "thinking" that is manifested in its ability to efficiently solve problems; growing in the most efficient way in order to find food. Slime mold has the ability to plan cities and solve mazes. Through studying and understanding other expressions of "intelligence" and "smartness" I intend to question the Western approach to the topic and propose new ways of thinking about what 'smart' means. How this could impact our approach to future planning and future city building. I am working or redefining how this new model of smartness could change the image of the smart cities of the future. Maybe there is something to learn? Currently future visions are portrayed as highly-digitised techno-utopias that prioritise technological progress, and all of the disadvantages and consequences that come with it. The value systems should be redefined and maybe this project will allow me to propose potential sets of new values? I am working on understanding how smart cities of the future, instead of becoming techno-utopias, could be smart in a variety of ways? This is definitely work in progress. For the midterm submission I prepared a video - an experiment- that briefly portrays an idea of a speculative Department of City Planning where the slime mold is the main decision maker, with which humans collaborate. The idea was that the slime mold, in a way, can be more efficient in finding solutions to making cities more efficient and more "organic" than the artificial grid system proposed by people. | Link to Project
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Hanul Park
BFA in Design and Technology + Screen Studies| Parsons School of Design + Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts
The_Net_Works| The_Net_Works is an analytical web resource on the digital environment of Telegram as a platform for cyber-enabled-sexual-crimes in the case of the "Nth Room" in South Korea. As an ethnographic research, it analyzes the under-discussed roles of Telegram's technical features in relation to crimes such as sex trafficking and cyber sextortion in the "Nth Room" case. The research has manifested as a web resource with readability and clarity in mind, with the hope of contributing to the online body of independent and non-profit collectives that work autonomously and continuously for social, legal, and cultural justice in cyber-enabled-sexual-crimes worldwide. | Link to Project | https://hanul-work.github.io/portfolio/index.html
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Henry Lee, Julienne DeVita
MFA in Transdiciplinary Design | Parsons School of Design
Academic Abstractions | The Academic Abstractions project is composed of a growing group of creatives, all dedicated to expanding access and inclusion in higher education by way of questioning traditional forms of production, distribution, and publication of knowledge. Through creative and provocative processes interpretation, synthesis, and making, the collective seeks to dismantle barriers between academic and creative ontologies. Academic Abstractions seeks to subvert epistemological silos that divide academia and more accessible creative ontologies, this project poses questions such as: who owns knowledge? Knowledge production? Knowledge interpretation? And how might we destabilize boundaries of knowledge creation and interpretation through creativity, abstraction, and making? | Link to Project
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Isabella Brandalise, Lucas Vaqueiro
PhD in the School of Design | RMIT University
The Cabinet of Bureaucratic Wonders | The Cabinet of Bureaucratic Wonders is an ongoing project that investigates materialities in the public sector. It is a collection of artifacts found in government facilities in Brazil, indexed and cataloged in three different categories. Situating the cabinet in such a context, we hope to call attention to the wonder around mundane artifacts, provoking reflections, and the emergence of possibilities around unsettled issues such as democracy and the role of government. This early prototype is the result of a participatory and evolving effort in close collaboration with civil servants. We mapped 9 artifacts that embody different temporalities, values, and agencies. | Link to Project
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Jonathan Nguyen with artwork by Syren Bier
BA in Anthropology and Global Public Health | New York University
The American Culture of Face Masks | My project is a research article which incorporates material ethnography and cultural commentary regarding face masks in American society during both the COVID-19 pandemic and Black Lives Matter movement protests. I utilized in-person and virtual observation methods along with dialogic participant observation for my ethnographic research on Los Angeles County residents and their experiences with the face mask. I have concluded that the coronavirus follows Mary Douglas’ four types of social pollution and Americans reacted to the viral pollutant with frighteningly violent individualism and paternalism. Thus, the face mask has become the most prominent visual trigger of the pandemic era. | Link to Project
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Julia W. Szagdaj, Nour Abou, Anna Lathrop
MFA in Transdiciplinary Design | Parsons School of Design
Imagining 3alam Badil | What if we could imagine a world without the oppressive systems of the current day? What if we did that while centering the emotion of liberated joy, or faraoyść? In April 2021, 18 Lebanese Negligence Refugees asked themselves that question. Collectively they created 6 speculative objects and names that they believed could help create an Alternative Lebanon. Our work demonstrated that the experience of imagination from a place of faraoyść allowed for liberatory joyful realities, strategies, and tactics to empower those who are already living, working, and striving in a space of the alternative. | Link to Project
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Justin Walker, Victoria Williamson, Alexandria Rengifo, Lavanya Julaniya
MDes in The Institute of Design | Illinois Institute of Technology
Tiny Stories About Freedom | Tiny Stories About Freedom is a digital space to immerse and engage with abolitionist theory and tactics through speculative storytelling and futuring. This exhibit features a collection of immersive stories that reimagines justice and freedom. Each featured story has been collectively developed through the use of our Freedom Futuring method. This still-evolving method operates at the intersection of autoethnography, autotheory, and design futuring, helping connect and translate diverse lived experience to pluriversal visions for the future. It aims to create a space for collective analysis, meaning making, and ideation, that inspires new world narratives with accompanying probes for reflection. | Link to Project | https://www.tinystoriesaboutfreedom.com/
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Kim Craig
PhD in Anthropology | Brandeis University
Origin Trail: A Geonarrative | Created in partial completion of a Master's Degree in sociocultural anthropology from Binghamton University, this short documentary film used Google Earth to aid in the collection of an oral history of a Salvadorian man with a neurodegenerative disorder as he describes his immigration journey to US during the Salvadoran Civil War. | Link to Project | www.kim-craig.com
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Layla Klinger
MFA in Textiles | Parsons School of Design
Still, Missing You | Diving into queer anthropology through the practice of bobbin lace making. In this project, I draw connections between lace, light and queerness. Through practice based research, these connections evolve in unexpected ways, manifesting in tangible and intangible queer lacescapes.| Link to Project | https://www.laylank.com/
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Lea Bernier-Coffineau
MA in Anthropology | The New School for Social Research
I Am Here | A vast number of refugee camps have been referenced on Google Maps over the years, enabling dwellers to upload comments and pictures from the inside of the camps. With their “smartphone as a lifeline” (Alencar et al, 2019), thousands of displaced individuals have left a trace of their existence on the platform, with the intent of reaching out to the outside world, hoping that someone, somewhere, would notice it. In this way, they have documented their lives in the camps, uploading photographs of family members, of depressing rainy days, of comforting meals, of pets and cattle, of sunsets, and -maybe the most telling of all- of themselves. They have posted comments as prayers, as political pamphlets, as cries for help, as denunciation of living conditions, as testimonies of their time in the camps. This digital exhibition uses data buried in the depth of Google Maps to create a sensible and human experience. | Link to Project | https://www.leacoffineau.xyz/iamhere
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Leila Lin
PhD in Anthropology | The New School for Social Research
AltRVUs: An Anthology of Alternate Island-Worlds and Ways of Valuing Work | In this project, I imagine, design, and visualize alternative forms of valuations of labor by questioning many fundamental assumptions we hold to be qualities of value, and then trying to tackle the even more difficult issue of how do we calculate what we hold as valuable by 1) making the familiars strange and vice versa and 2) attending to radical difference among practices of reasoning. | Link to Project | https://www.leilalin.com/
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Lilah Doris
MA in Anthropology | The New School for Social Research
Can the Landscape be Liminal? Experimenting with Land Art Experiences Across New, Unexpected Environments | This is a project about scalar and phenomenological relationships between site and self. It asks questions about what happens when experiences of being and experiences of engaging with the world that are designed to happen at one specific site are inaccessible, and therefore engagement must be re-designed. It focuses on themes of ontological design, landscape design, premeditated engagements with the world, and material and scalar dimensions of interpreting the self. | Link to Project
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Liliana Gil
PhD in Anthropology | The New School for Social Research
A FabLab at the Periphery – Fieldwork Photo Essay | Over the last decades, a mounting number of tech spaces has emerged worldwide with the purpose of promoting innovation and entrepreneurship. Based on long-term ethnographic research, this photo essay focuses on one of such initiatives in Brazil – a public laboratory of digital fabrication located in a low-income neighborhood in the periphery of São Paulo. Pushing against a monolithic image of tech collectives, I explore how the laboratory connects to local sociopolitical histories and nurtures a diverse range of audiences and creative practices. | Link to Project | http://lilianagil.info/
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Livia Foldes
MFA in Design and Technology | Parsons School of Design
Coded Portraits | Coded Portraits is a framework for understanding, appropriating, and reclaiming machine vision. Beginning with the question, "what do I look like to a machine?" I run a selfie through different computer vision algorithms to generate a series of self-portraits. Then, I recreate the generated images by hand, altering and re-coding them with my own annotations. The resulting images are a dialogue between my original photograph, the ways it was “seen” and interpreted by a machine, and my response to the gaps and tensions that these modes of “seeing” expose. Ultimately, the re-coded portraits conceal as well as reveal: the altered images are no longer recognizable as human to facial recognition algorithms. | Link to Project | https://livia-foldes.com/
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MariaEugenia Dominguez, Miriam Young
MA in Transdiciplinary Design | Parsons School of Design
A Brooklyn Street Tree Typology: Examining Multispecies Relations in Urban Tree Wells | While trees in forests communicate with one another through complex mycorrhizal networks underground, Brooklyn street trees often appear alone, contained in small plots of land fenced off from the sidewalk. Some tree wells are neglected, covered in trash, while others are plastered with signage from local residents. In this Brooklyn Street Tree Typology, we analyze the multispecies interactions at play in these spaces and how Brooklynites attempt to micromanage these microcosms. What can these small pieces of land teach us about the big blindspots and assumptions urbanites have when we attempt to manage ecological questions of any scale? | Link to Project | https://www.specfoliospectacular.com/
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Natalie DeAbreu
MA in Anthropology | The New School for Social Research
Ghost Voices | A piece of a photo series exploring how technology and in turn Cyborgs would be designed if by indigenous communities in the Caribbean region. | Link to Project | https://www.natalieadeabreu.com/photography
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Nicholas DuPont
MA in Photography | Parsons School of Design
Photographs as Anthropological Knowledge | "Photographs as Anthropological Knowledge" focuses on how photography has been historically used by anthropologists and artists to create, understand, and communicate cultural knowledge. By analyzing photographic archives created by anthropologists in the 19th and 20th centuries, this book questions how photographs have represented and also misrepresented Indigenous communities in the past. "Photographs as Anthropological Knowledge" highlights several photographic series by anthropologists and artists that encompass the dual nature of photography's ability to visually convey and authenticate cultural knowledge. | Link to Project | https://www.nicholasdupont.com/
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Noemi Florea
BA/BFA in Environmental Studies and Integrated Design | Eugene Lang College & The Parsons School of Design
Cycleau Sanitation | Throughout low-income communities worldwide, access to a reliable means of sanitation is limited. Clean water might be distant or sparse, while available electricity may be unreliable or expensive. In providing a household means of recycling chlorine and iodine solutions for daily tasks including washing clothes and dishes, communities with limited access to clean water are able to optimize available water resources while conserving energy and cost. Cycleau Sanitation equipment, which is based on principles of minimal energy use and cyclical hydraulic motion, can become a progressive installment for developing a secure means of public sanitation in underserved communities worldwide. | Link to Project | http://noemiflorea.com/
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Oscar Fossum
MA in Anthropology | The New School for Social Research
Mesh STS - Podcast | The Mesh STS podcast foregrounds the voices of grassroots mesh networking organizers and academics in NYC. NYC Mesh is a community-based network that uses peer-to-peer connections between rooftop antennas to create a distributed network that spans NYC from the Bronx to Brooklyn. This podcast episode addresses three themes within the mesh networking ecosystem. The first section covers the topic of ‘decentralization’ on a material and social level. The second section thinks through infrastructural nestedness, and how different actors in the telecommunications network interact. The final section covers failure and sustainability of mesh networks, looking to the synergies and ongoing struggles faced by community-based networking projects. | Link to Project | https://www.oscarfossum.com/
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Rachel Muse Pincus
MA in Media Studies| The New School, School for Public Engagement
The New York Waterfront And Nostalgia for the Mud | The West Side Highway in Manhattan had an elevated predecessor called the Miller Highway that collapsed in 1973 and was allowed to rot for over 15 years before being demolished and rebuilt in the early 90’s. Despite its disuse, the Miller and the waterfront around it were a site of danger, but also an unprecedented cultural flourishing, especially in the queer community. These informal communities contrast with today’s High Line nearby, where humans and small ecosystems continue to flourish, but this time legally and with public-private approval and investment. The two case studies offer interesting examples of how infrastructure influences a city’s idea of its past and what is possible for its future. | Link to Project
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Taylor Miles Hopkins
MDes | University of Washington
Tomorrow's Book: Artifacts in the Anthropocene | The Anthropocene is our current epoch in which the Earth’s environment and residents are impacted by human influence. While many recognize the possible effects of Anthropogenic change, such as high levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, biodiversity loss, and extensive waste, it can be difficult to imagine how the world might actually alter. Narratives allow us to weave diverse ideas together to relate to the experiences of others and grasp abstract information. Speculative design brings attention to present societal issues while designing artifacts for the future. So, what artifact could be better to tell stories than the book? Its form often reflects the current point of our world, so what forms will it take in the future? Through a creation of future books addressing the projected challenges of the Anthropocene, this project uses design as a storytelling tool to communicate to readers how their futures, as well as the book’s, will need to adapt to our changing world. | Link to Project | https://taylor-miles.com/
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Teddy Sandler
BA in Art History and Anthropology | University of Chicago
All Dolled Up; Conceptions of Childhood Through Doll Games | Dolls relay racial, gender, and power structures through their design choices and perpetuate stereotypes as children apply ways of being on dolls through play. The village of Catoctin provides a case study of multiple eras of dolls in one place, displaying continuations of themes as types of dolls went in and out of prominence. I believe that using these historical findings and analyzing the design of similar dolls in those eras can provide a picture of how design practices reflect social dynamics and hope insights from my interview help capture how children conceptualized their place through dolls. | Link to Project | https://imgmaterialgirlz.tumblr.com/
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Vaidehi Supatkar
MA in Transdiciplinary Design | Parsons School of Design
Reimagining search | What if the internet was a more inclusive space truly representing plural views?
How would a decolonized distributed internet look like? Imagine when every question you ask has 20 different answers, prompts that change based on time? Material, Immaterial, cosmic, rational, irrational. How confusing or clear would your plural search be then? The project determines to reimagine how we seek knowledge from the digital systems around us and present a fictional alternate reality where the way we search differs to reveal the linearity in the system we use today. Fictional Narrative to set the context.To increase participation on the internet India has received a mandate by the Government of India in partnership with Google to make it mandatory for people to participate and sign up with the internet to build a new model that serves and generates data. Run by revenue and building a strong nationalist agenda hence run by a nation which can be surveilled and kept an eye on its citizens through the company. As a way to break up with this movement people have refused to participate in the global world wide web and have gone offline to start a regional peer-to-peer network called online regional web belts. As these local underground peer-to-peer networks are emerging so is the local culture and its platforms.' What if the way you search was truly plural? shifting on facets, time, material if the internet is the only source of searching information whose knowledge is being listed on the top? Who decides that? Who influences that? Who is the non-participant and feels left behind? What if the information was as dynamic and non-hierarchical as this search how would the world change? | Link to Project | https://www.vaidehisupatkar.org/
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Whitney Johnson
Postdoctoral- Media Arts and Design | University of Chicago
Huizkol: Ethnographic Soundwalk | Huizkol, which premiered as an audio-visual performance at Chicago's Lampo series in February 2020, is an opportunity to engage with our own skepticism and belief in the effects of sound on the body. As an ethnographic sound walk, this piece is designed to accompany a journey to and from a location 24.5 minutes from your starting point. The practice of "brainwave entrainment" claims that exposure to binaural beats of varying speeds can stimulate different types of brain activity. Over the course of 49 minutes, Huizkol begins at a resting state and elevates the speed of binaural beats to a highly stimulated rate before returning the listener's mind to a state of deep rest in the end. By choosing a location 24.5 minutes away from the starting point, a participant can engage with the possibility of an energetic and observational climax, making possible a relatively deeper state of relaxation after that stimulus. By engaging with an alternative practice such as brainwave entrainment, participants can contemplate the power of suggestion, the nexus of mind-sensation-body, as well as their own pleasure or discomfort in the possibility that sound might be able to affect the mind in such profound ways. Does the rise and fall of Huizkol relate to your perception of the destination, your experience of the journey, and your engagement with the social world? | Link to Project | https://matchess.tumblr.com/
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Zoe Graveline
MA in Anthropology | The New School for Social Research
Technopolitical Designs of Anti-Homeless Regimes: A Work in Progress | This project presents a case study of the recent “Temporary Outdoor Living Ordinance” (TOLO) in Santa Cruz, California, which unfairly targets unhoused people and effectively criminalizes homelessness within city limits. I am writing this paper to criticize the city's lack of compassion and understanding of reality. I hope to illustrate the visual impact of maps and other descriptive imagery as well as their political mobilization here. One of my primary questions is: Is it possible to design housing solutions when people being directly affected are not meaningfully involved throughout the entire process? | Link to Project | https://www.bitchnuggetart.com/
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