I see myself as a literary curator — I collect and sequence texts and images, both digital and analog, to reveal, connect, and construct narratives, resulting in shifting meanings and significances.* Inhabiting this curatorial ethos, I investigate hidden subtexts, locating personal and collective relations to the margins and files marked “miscellany.” Working in books and installations, I engage with the inherited meanings of visual languages (form, typography, color, material, format) to open up well-worn narratives and craft new interpretations.

Tiny Diasporas is a primer to a design practice that borrows the form of an abecedarius, an alphabetical wordlist for learning the basics of reading and writing. The title comes from a quote by the artist-gatherer Danh Vo, who describes his work as “the tiny diasporas that make up a person’s life.” In this thesis, through projects and interviews, I outline a practice that addresses broad political themes refracted through personal narratives. Where artists like Danh Vo use the museum space as a site for repositioning historical objects to create new meanings, I use the book form as a space for curatorial intervention. A site where interpretation (meaning) is mediated by the space between image and text and through sequence, the book allows me to address my family’s displacement in the context of a militarized state, the traces created by entropy in the everyday and by museum spaces, and historiography as a critical form of creative production.

* “Literary curators are actors who mainly mediate, distribute, (re)present, publish, or exhibit in new contexts texts that have been produced by people other than themselves and who thereby create literary phenomena in the public.” Hanna Kuusela, “The Rise in Curatorial Ethos in Contemporary Literature,” in Publishing as Artistic Practice, ed. Annette Gilbert (Berlin: Sternberg Press, ), 119.

Angela Lorenzo

Space, Junk acknowledges and embraces the world as a chaotic and uncertain place. Graphic design often directly contrasts the messiness of humanity. Clean and ordered composition can conceal the muddled nature of a subject. The designer’s role isn’t to force perfection, but to create an aesthetic that accurately represents content. I place value on rips, smears, blurriness, and distortion as well as feelings provoked by variability. Through works created in multiple spaces (book space, architectural space, web space, etc.) this thesis focuses on finding worth in undervalued junk, using mess as a means to represent convoluted issues, and utilizing fun and humor as a way to embrace and normalize uncertainty.

Brandon Olsen

HAUNT: Casual Surrealism aims to define, observe and create a feeling of surrealism through a series of design gestures. The process began with a question: If I, as a designer, immerse myself in a subculture that I have no interest in, will I become a fan of it? To attempt this, I created systems and tools to deeply investigate each subculture. I observed and recorded what I experienced. As a case study, the haunted attraction community captured my attention. I went to their conventions and took classes in the crafts of “the haunt.” While immersed in this community, I started to see things that felt accidentally strange. Even in a subculture with intentionally spooky aesthetics, there was another kind of non-intentional surrealism.

After discovering this “casual surrealism,” I studied its formal mechanics, and I wanted to know if I could recreate it. I played the role of a perverse spectator of both the subcultures that I experienced and of graphic design itself. In some projects, I reduced my work to caricature, making a cartoon of the concept as well as the appearance. Other projects used loose associations played out to their logical ends. I tried to portray something that just doesn’t seem right in its most perfect and precise manner.

Identifying casual surrealism creates friction between the feeling of enjoyment and the awareness of judgment. Through the combination of confusion and recognition, casual surrealism reignites curiosity in spaces where observation has become ritualized. Does this thesis simply observe casual surrealism? Or are there places where I have created this specific uncanny feeling?

Cara Buzzell

Anachropomorphism!

Folks, the Truth is hard to know—if can be known at all. Conventional Western wisdom tells us: stick to the facts. (I’m looking at you, Enlightenment.) We privilege the written word as an objective and reliable vehicle for communication. Useful, yes, but we over-rely. I counter with this: bodily performativity and purposeful inaccuracy that produces, paradoxically, narrative accuracy. These methods roil in our gut or tug at our heartstrings—instead of recoiling, we should embrace them.

I like to unpack “the stories we tell ourselves,” our personal and societal mythologies, with a particular eye to how the past plays a role in these constructions. Telling things slant—diving into the uncanny—disrupts our visual complacency with both delight and disorientation. By employing temporal and spatial anachronisms in a performative motion-based practice, I aim not to obscure truth, but to promote inquiry.

Carson Evans

Graphic design has been referred to as a tool of inquiry — a method of thinking visually. Design can polish, beautify, hierarchize, eliminate, prioritize, propagandize, or disseminate. Using spatial inquiry as a primary mode of investigation, I argue that graphic design is also a process of attention and care. How can graphic design be a tool of expansion and inclusion?

By encouraging spaces of attention and listening within the built environment and virtual worlds, we can think critically about power dynamics, interiority and exteriority, and subjectivity and objectivity. Within this phase of late capitalism, I focus on leftovers, scraps, and the historically unpictured to experiment with methods of interruption and connection.

In Placefulness, I take on the role of the radical cartographer in order to map landscapes of imagination and amplify under-projected narratives. Through examination and recombination of often invisible lines of inclusion and exclusion, I draw attention to historic and local multiplicities of experience in order to advocate for a more just future. By interrupting the dominant narrative signals of historic ‘place,’ Placefulness prioritizes an immediate sense of the lived and local.

Ellen Christensen

Field Guide: Collected Studies of a Symbiont is a collection of studies that explore how symbiosis relates to graphic design. These studies investigate how visual language constructs — and is constructed by — ideas about nature.

As a manipulator of language and imagery, I borrow the ecologist’s methods in order to make sense of our relationship with the natural world. My techniques include observation, collection, mutation, framing and recombination. I use these methods not to celebrate them, but to expose their subjective nature.

I approach visual language, technology, and our ecological home as an entangled set of ideas rather than estranged categories. My work investigates how power is linked to optics and perception, how evolution is a common creative language, and how the divide between ‘natural’ and ‘artificial’ is increasingly blurred. Overall, these studies are based in a desire to reveal symbiotic interactions.

The products of my inquiry embrace murkiness, blurriness, and interconnectedness. They highlight ecosystems rather than isolated details. They complicate the categories in which we place matter. I do not intend to rationalize information or provide answers. I strive to to raise questions about the relationship between what we make and who we are.

A guide can act as a document for identifying things that already exist or as an assemblage of methods and tools to direct further creation. For my practice, this field guide acts as both.

Jenn Livermore

Reading Rooms examines a set of three conditions for diverse modes of spatial reading. These conditions originate from three common terms: object, space, and performer, which I have subjectively defined through my thesis work. I hope to clarify my own design methodology by examining these terminologies through the thesis process.

I regard printed media as independent objects which have physical qualities: material, texture, volume, and depth. My practice emphasizes physical forms as architectural structures which can be transformed and evolve through readers’ interpretations of the objects. The true communication with my physical work can be realized by touching, moving, and changing structures. These interactions lead to new realizations that viewers cannot achieve until they physically approach the objects.

I also view myself as a mediator between physical and digital realities: I experiment with the spatial qualities of these two distinct worlds, surveying the symbiotic relationship between two-dimensional and three-dimensional spaces. My practice oscillates between intimacy and unfamiliarity by distorting readers’ perceptions of space. These visuospatial experiments create imaginative spaces where readers can enjoy bizarre sensations while suspended between physical and digital, 2D and 3D spaces.

I construct communicative reading environments by engaging with interactive technologies that connect physical and virtual worlds. My practice establishes a collaborative platform or stage where one or more readers are invited to “perform” work. In this stage, readers become creators of their own “reading rooms,” which consist of graphical traces created by media in response to the readers’ performances.

Reading Rooms

Work is part of our identity and dictates how workers spend most of their time in the US. This obsession has truncated our imagination and ability to conceive of alternatives. As a tactic to reclaim free time, I offer a practice I refer to as squishy play in which participants momentarily adopt new social norms to collectively discover new ways of engaging with the world and each other.

I use squishy play as a lens to investigate the power structures, social norms, and material output of late capitalism in the US. Squishy play is generous in its frivolity. It is mobile. It allows for new modes of thinking. It is resilient and adaptive to the world it is given. It is inherently interactive. In squishy play, I use bluntness, absurdity, repetition, transparency, translation, and an economy of moves to foreground the deeply embedded values and social structures of society. Squishy play knows that it must not take itself too seriously, but never forgets that it also must take itself really really seriously.

Lauren Traugott-Campbell

Dear reader,

Welcome.

In Constellations you will find a collection of projects that both reflect and simultaneously reinvent my personal way of seeing the world, which I consider to be a space that is complex, diverse, and in continuous transformation. Graphic design is the lens through which I examine and understand this complexity, and it is also the medium through which I translate this huge realm into navigable systems of ideas, tales, forms, and experiences.

I have been inspired to produce my own systems in response to those I discover through actively observing my environment (territory), reflecting upon my personal background (origin), and witnessing constant growth and transformation (roots). Participating in this conversation through design allows me to expand this inquiry into the nature of systems and invites me to contribute my own voice to the larger dialogue.

Systems, however, do not necessarily imply linearity. Everything converges, overlaps, builds, and reveals. As a designer, I have to trust my process and intuition, aspects that are alive and always in flux. I have to observe, locate, define, relate, tell, make, wait, question, and decide. These decisions become behavior, and in the end this is what gives rise to new systems. It is in this spirit that this book has been designed and asks to be experienced. In its pages, I illustrate my ways of seeing by collecting component parts that invite the reader to find connections among them. In this way, these pieces gradually, and almost magically, reveal themselves to be a whole.

Maria Rull Bescos

Hyperlink: connecting space, time, language, and technology constitutes a methodology for examining our use of systems and tools. We are constantly generating physical and digital residues, and tracing them can reveal an underlying syntax of structures that produced them. I work with these artifacts to highlight the capacities and constraints of language and technology, and what results is a transparency that draws us closer to the raw material. Once broken down into bare elements, new forms can then be resynthesized. Both critical and celebratory, this inquiry uncovers logical structures to reimagine means of making and to create alternate tools for thought.

Marie Otsuka

Monument for Feeling: Notes from the Archivist

I’ve always loved the conjunctions unless, yet, however, although. Grammatical interventions, they subvert all things certain, rational, and indisputable, opening a series of syntactic doorways into new, undetermined possibilities.

The pieces in the Institute fo? Contempo?a?y Inqui?y’s archive function like those conjunctions. They refuse and destabilize easy categorization, pointing, like a rhizome, toward a thousand different possible pasts — and just as many futures.

To be clear, the Institute fo? Contempo?a?y Inqui?y does not have a physical site. It is a network of psychic locations materialized through its archive. It is, in other words, what I have gathered.

I have taken great care to arrange these materials in a manner that reflects the spatial, temporal, and psychic proximity in which I found them. You will find that I have preserved the original folders, including their labels — Capitalism, Climate, and Time, the Unstable Image; Resistance; Critical Optimism and Self-definition; Memory, Inheritance, and Hope, and, lastly, Conversation — but have also taken the questionable liberty of adding my own notes.

Perhaps it would have behooved the Institute to hire an archivist with more linear and obedient inclinations. But I’m thankful, for my own sake, that they did not.

Melissa Weiss

This is public work positions graphic design as an integral form of public works. This is public work regards the causal relationship between graphic design and its publics as an opportunity to explore the formal maneuvers to enhance an artifact's visual codes. The idea is an experiential one: rich and meaningful form can lead to rich and meaningful experiences.

The designed artifacts of our world function across informational (effect) and emotional (affect) modes. The complexity of these operations take on an infrastructural role — what we see day-to-day shapes our experiences and understanding. The opportunity of a designer to practice in a manner responsible to their publics is to see the task beyond yielding a service. By creating artifacts that participate in culture, designers have the ability to affect public life.

My practice is an effort to formally unite the ideas of affect and effect into a singular expression: æffect — the way a thing feels is how it works. My thesis focuses on the nuances of letterforms and graphic form. This was an intentional effort to sharpen my craft and attention to detail as a way to engage meaningful æffect uniting concept, form, and message.

To care for the details is to care for the public. The smallest thing builds the larger thing.

Nick Adam

Lingua Franca examines how graphic design and art are used as a common language between people who speak the same language, speak different languages or have distinct cultural backgrounds. Understanding languages as living systems that are in constant movement and in direct relation with cultures, this thesis looks at graphic design as a platform for coding and decoding language, shaping and reshaping it.

My fascination with the relationship between culture, language and linguistics led me to investigate topics such as context collapse, the evolution of Spanish in Latin America, and notions of identity, gender and translation. In a moment of global political, economic and social chaos, Lingua Franca is a place for actions, reactions, interactions and counteractions that translate into criticism, proposals,and optimistic projects. As a way of acknowledging the subtleties, ambiguities, politics and power structures that lie within languages, the projects of this thesis pay special attention to language as a significant tool for graphic design.

Lingua Franca is a celebration of language, of its intricacies and possibilities. It uses graphic design as a vital mediator, a translator to a common language that enables criticism, fosters conversations and activates responses.

Tatiana Gómez Gaggero