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.

In Shuyi Wang’s thesis, Buying Possibilities: The Double Edge of Blind Box Culture, she explains that "Blind Box'' is not a new concept; it is a popular buying mechanism in which users make a purchase without knowing what they have bought—at least, not until after they’ve opened it. The positive mechanism of the blind box is its ability to surprise people with the unexpectable. The negative is its ability to make users addicted and trigger impulsive behavior. She expands her thesis to include the social impact of the smartphone as a virtual blind box. Through her designs, she seeks to utilize the blind box’s positive mechanism to motivate and inspire children, and to help people disconnect from their phones in order to better focus and socialize. Her goal is to combat the pitfalls of the blind box’s negative mechanism by revaluing items and reintroducing the joy of surprise, thereby reinvigorating the beauty and power of real-life interpersonal connections.