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.

All relationships require work, and the effort one puts into maintaining a marriage directly impacts its quality. Crystal Lo's thesis, Sparks: Marriage, Connection, and Design, presents solutions to improve satisfaction and rekindle passion in long-term marriages when couples feel their relationships are strained.

Yiming Xu’s thesis, Meet You on the Steps: Museums as Social Experiences, reimagines the visitor experience and impression of art museums. Her thesis questions how design can balance the power relationship between institution and visitor, facilitate visitors' autonomy and satisfaction, cultivate art accomplishments through daily life, and eliminate cultural barriers and stereotypes surrounding conventional art museums.

Having lived most of his life interacting with the local economy in Mumbai, Siddhant Goyle began examining the complex and scattered nature of what many experts call "the underground economy." The informal sector has to be classified as illegal, unlawful, and underground by nature because vendors and businesses are operating without a legal permit. This permit enables one to sell goods or services within defined legal parameters. Furthermore, it mandates the charging and payment of taxes, thereby ensuring that the holder fulfills their responsibilities to the government while operating a profitable business. Siddhant's thesis, The Scattered Billion: Designing for the Grey Economy, interrogates the informal sector's scattered nature and the people interacting with it daily.

Due to the maturity of technologies such as search engines and digital platforms, information transparency is at an all-time high. Whenever an individual has a specific need, he or she can easily search online to locate a provider who can directly fulfill that need rather than go through a middleman.

This phenomenon, called disintermediation, is the subject of Yufeng Peng’s thesis. In Disintermediation and Design: Customers, Producers, and the Platform, Yufeng explores this topic from three angles: career planning for Chinese students, physical manufacturing, and the food industry. He aims to help consumers fulfill their needs by building collaborative relationships with service providers instead of passively accepting whatever dominant companies and large corporations provide.

In her thesis, Second-Hand, Second-Love: Reimagining Sustainable Fashion in China, Zhenxuan Wang set out to decipher why Chinese consumers attach such a stigma to second-hand clothing. She found that emotional attachment, self-fulfillment, and the lifespan of apparel can lessen or remove this stigma, and therefore play an essential role in the market's sustainable growth and evolution.