Contact mics exist at the intersection of experimental music, sound art, analog electronics, and DIY-making culture. In her thesis, Anne Keating explores the design challenge of analog sound circuits, contact mic'd instruments, and the DIY maker culture surrounding the contact mic. She looks at the space occupied by noise artists and boutique guitar pedal makers who build contact mic'd noise devices. She examines how building contact mics serve as a gateway to analog circuit building and why this activity is relevant against the backdrop of digital devices and experiences.

Designers hate piracy. We have been told that pirates are the natural enemy of designers and the corruption of this industry. Nevertheless, Zekun Yang still chose piracy as her topic because she believes that we must challenge our assumptions to create change. In her thesis, Zekun acts as a pirate herself to "hack" into the design industry and address the problem of imbalance between designers and users, bringing a more inclusive future. This thesis can be summarized with a simple axiom: Do as a pirate does—it serves as an Unauthorized Hacking Guide to a Creative Future. In what follows, Zekun has designed products to encourage people to act like pirates, critique designs, and invite more people to build, make and design. She has also pirated the way pirates behave and applied it to make a formerly exclusive industry more inclusive.

Isabell Park's thesis, The Powerless Metaverse: Inclusivity, Equity, and Ownership, investigates the Metaverse through the lens of design to solve complex problems of access, socioeconomic gaps, and more. Metaverse, a recent buzzword, is defined as a digital world currently entered through virtual reality (VR) or augmented reality (AR) that allows people to interact, mimicking the real world. Isabell was inspired to explore the topic when the South Korean government recently decided to significantly invest in the Metaverse. “This funding expanded opportunities for people to enter the Metaverse.” Isabell explains. “With skyrocketing rents and low wages, the socioeconomic gap is significant.” This inequality allowed only the top 10% to afford physical properties—whereas people found the Metaverse to be an opportunity to own digital investments and properties. In Isabell’s design investigations she asks the question, “Does this technology have to lead to such a dark future?”

Karan Mahendra Bansal’s thesis, Overwhelmed: Work, Play, Time, and Design, investigates Time Poverty in the context of knowledge workers. Defined as the state or condition in which an individual lacks the discretionary time required for activities to build their social and human capital, he asserts that the underlying reason for Time Poverty is not the lack of time, but the lack of choice. Roughly 80% of American knowledge workers feel that they never have enough time to do the things they want to, and collectively fail to utilize approximately 700 million vacation days each year. Startled by the magnitude of this fact, Karan began to explore our complicated relationship with time.

Bethany Fronhofer, who was homeschooled for the majority of her school years, has experienced many types of learning. These ranged from training a team of oxen to writing fiction to taking traditional math and science classes. As a hands-on learner, she was dissatisfied with the heavy bias toward lectures and reading/writing assignments in public school classes. Her thesis, The Uncommon Core: A Design Exploration of Active Education for Kinesthetic Learners, questions how and why educational design prioritizes some styles of learning over others and creates a space to consider new ways of including hands-on learning in curriculums and educational environments.