Rida Zeng's thesis, Metaphor as Medicine: Revealing Meaning to Transform Chronic Pain, asks a question millions of people meet every time they walk into a doctor's office: how do you describe a pain that has no words? Today, 1 in 4 adults in the U.S. live with chronic pain, the leading cause of disability worldwide. Yet the clinical communication standard remains the Wong-Baker chart, invented in the 1980s.

Eva Mo’s thesis, Between Presence and Production: Boundary Collapse in Remote Work, examines how remote labor reshapes domestic space and everyday cognition, arguing that many of the stresses associated with working from home stem less from productivity itself than from the disappearance of clear environmental boundaries.

Qianyue Zhou’s thesis, Performing Realness: Posting, Pressure, and Visibility on Social Media, investigates how social media transforms everyday life into something visible, measurable, and performative. Beginning with her own experience of overthinking what to post, she explores how the desire to appear authentic online can create new forms of pressure. Her work looks closely at the full cycle of a moment capture, review, share, and response — and proposes alternative ways for people to document and exchange real life with less performance, less optimization, and more presence.

Guðrún Þöll Torfadóttir’s thesis Designing Everyday Energy: Reimagining Renewables in the Home explores how electricity can be generated within the home and how renewable energy can become more accessible in everyday life. Growing up in Iceland, where all electricity comes from renewable sources, Guðrún was surprised to discover that New York City, one of the world’s most powerful cities, still relies on fossil fuels to generate energy. Her thesis asks: how might renters in urban environments become active participants in the transition to clean energy while reducing their electricity costs?

Sige Zheng's thesis, Sharing Waves: When Digital Nomads Meet Local Communities in Puerto Escondido, Mexico, investigates how the rapid growth of digital nomadism affects community life and local infrastructure in Puerto Escondido. As a designer, surfer, and traveler, Sige has witnessed the surge in remote work and digital nomadism following COVID-19. Digital nomads arrive in Puerto Escondido and fall in love with the place. But love without responsibility has a cost—tourism growth has outpaced local infrastructure development. While grassroots organizations continue to support the community, many newcomers remain parallel to these efforts. This thesis asks: how might design create a meaningful bridge between those who are passing through and the communities and places they encounter—at the beginning, during, and beyond their journey?

Lynn Zhang’s thesis, From Compulsive to Conscious: Using Somatic Rituals to Rewrite Behaviors, explores how design can transform the physical intensity found in compulsive behaviors into safer, voluntary, and meaning-making rituals. For Lynn, the project began with a contradiction: why do people sometimes deliberately seek physical pain? Habits like nail biting, skin picking, or hair pulling may seem minor, but they exist on a spectrum that can escalate into compulsive, addictive, or self-injurious behavior.

Lauren Palazzi’s thesis, Holding On Differently: Reimagining Heirlooms in an Ephemeral World, examines how inheritance is changing and what that means for the objects and stories people leave behind. Rather than treating heirlooms as rare or especially valuable possessions, the project looks at the broader systems that shape how meaning is preserved, transferred, or lost across generations. It asks what happens when the cultural habits that once sustained heirlooms no longer fit the way people live now.

Carol Tian’s thesis, Expressing Anxiety (焦虑) in American Contexts, explores how Asian cultural values shape the way anxiety is experienced, expressed, and supported among young Chinese women living in the United States. While many existing emotional support systems emphasize direct communication, verbal openness, and immediate sharing, Carol’s thesis investigates what emotional support might look like for people who experience anxiety more quietly—through restraint, internalization, or indirect expression.

Haosen Zhang's thesis, Good Vibrations: Centering the Hum of Nature in Everyday Life, examines the psychological and physiological effects of losing everyday access to natural sound. As urban development continues to replace green space with dense infrastructure and accelerated routines, the sounds that once shaped daily life—rainfall, wind, insects, moving water—are increasingly absent from contemporary environments. While design disciplines often prioritize the visual and tactile, Haosen’s project focuses on sound as an overlooked component of well-being and asks how natural soundscapes might be reintegrated into everyday life through design.

Christiana Aghjayan's thesis, The Language of the Road: From Noise to Nuance, begins with a sound. A horn. Maybe two. If you've spent any time in New York City traffic, you know exactly what that sounds like, and more importantly, you know it means almost nothing and everything at once. Is that honk signally anger? A warning? A hello? An accident narrowly avoided?
Road communication, as it turns out, is a deeply broken design system, and Christiana has spent the last two years figuring out why, and what to do about it.

Sofia Grytsenko's thesis, Rekindling Joy: The Power of Play in Design, explores what it means to design for joy, not as a side effect, but as an intention. Through a series of interventions, experiments, and prototypes, her work asks: can joy be designed? And if so, what conditions does it require? Sofia's inquiry began with a personal observation. Looking back at photographs of herself at different ages and in different places, she noticed a consistent thread: the presence of joy. But as she paid closer attention to the world around her, especially in New York City, she began to see something else. In everyday spaces like the subway, people were physically together but mentally elsewhere. This raised a question that would shape her entire thesis: are we designing environments that allow joy to emerge at all?

Qi Guan’s thesis, Sensory Overload and the Reduction of Environmental Attention, investigates how to support sensory-sensitive individuals in regaining focus within urban environments. The project addresses the anxiety and sensory overload induced by fast-paced city conditions, which often lead to attention fatigue and withdrawal from surroundings. By identifying critical moments of stress and introducing targeted design interventions, the project seeks to mitigate cognitive overload and facilitate more stable attentional states.

What began as a five-day art and travel summer camp in Barbados became the foundation for Ta-Shea Brown's thesis, Creativity to Enterprise: Art Education as a Pathway to Entrepreneurship. During the camp, children aged 8–12 visited local landmarks and created on-site observational paintings. The experience revealed not only a strong enthusiasm for creative expression, but also a larger question: what happens after a child's first creative experience? How might that early interest be nurtured into confidence, skill-building, mentorship, and future opportunity?

Jessie Wang’s thesis, “Table for One”? Building a Culture of Solo Dining, explores how hospitality design can support the growing culture of solo dining through spatial systems, service design, and emotional experience. As an interior designer, product designer, and restaurant designer, Jessie has long been interested in how space shapes emotion and behavior. Over the past few years, she noticed a quiet but powerful cultural shift: more people were dining alone, not because they had to, but because they wanted to. Yet despite this shift, most restaurants, dining systems, and hospitality experiences are still designed around groups. Dining alone often feels like an afterthought.

Benjamin Hone's thesis, Spectatorship: Instigating Sports Fans to Get Into the Climate Game, explores the identity, rituals, and embodied movements of fandom to develop design interventions that encourage sports fans to take regenerative climate action. Like many things people love, sports are being impacted by the climate crisis. Fans often turn to sports as an escape from political instability, environmental anxiety, and other global challenges. Yet the rituals surrounding fandom can also intensify the very conditions from which people seek relief.

In an era of funding cuts, growing data gaps, and political rhetoric dragging swamps through the mud, wetlands are in dire need of advocates. Monty Preston's thesis, Entangle! Reconnecting to Wetlands Through Citizen Science, explores how structured encounters can change how we spend time with wetlands in New York parks, creating stewards who both care about them and contribute to their conservation.

While climate change is a universal and one of the most concerning challenges of our generation, climate action is driving significant green investments and transformations in our era. But is climate change affecting everyone the same way? What perspectives are missing while deploying these climate solutions and initiatives?

Growing up surrounded by nature, Cyntia Abarca became a sustainability enthusiast from a young age. However, she was unaware of the potential links between achieving gender equality, addressing the climate agenda, and building a sustainable future. These missing links and questions led her to explore the connections between women and climate. Her thesis, Changing Climate: Elevating Women and Youth as Agents of Action, presents five design interventions to address climate issues from a gender perspective, aiming to catalyze action while achieving gender equality from different fronts.

Jose "Achi" Martin's thesis, Mods, studies the benefits of adaptive gaming for people with motor skill disabilities and explores industry-changing ideas that combat ableism in today's gaming landscape. Jose was inspired by his beloved older brother, who suffered a prenatal ischemic stroke resulting in semi-paralysis on the right side of his body. Since childhood, the two shared a passion for playing video games together, and Jose watched in awe as his brother played using just one hand. Twenty years later, this is still the case. 

Corey McClelland's thesis, Beyond the Right Stuff: Designing for Disability Inclusion in Space, centers around researching the challenges and opportunities of designing for disability inclusion in space. One major challenge is the lack of accessibility in space technology and infrastructure, as many tools and equipment used are not designed with the needs of individuals with disabilities in mind. Another challenge is the lack of representation of individuals with disabilities in the space industry. However, initiatives like AstroAccess and other disability-inclusive projects have pushed for change and increased industry representation. Corey's research has shown that individuals with disabilities have unique skills and perspectives that can be leveraged to create innovative solutions to space exploration challenges. The push for disability inclusion in space can also lead to a more accessible and inclusive society as a whole.

Cathy Tung's thesis, Well-rounded: Using Art to Enhance Interdisciplinary Learning, sheds light on the potential of art-integrated education to promote the development of hard and soft skills in children. Cathy highlights that traditional education, confined within classroom walls, can be mundane and unstimulating for children to engage with. Conversely, incorporating resources from art museums as a location-based learning tool can provide an interactive and engaging experience that presents opportunities for interdisciplinary learning. This approach can also address the budgetary constraints public schools face in providing adequate art education, particularly in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and the associated budget cuts.