Thesis Project Highlights

Regena Paloma Reyes is a service designer, New York City resident, and urban enthusiast. Her thesis, N-3+Me: Urban Resilience at Human Scale, investigates factors that promote adaptability in city-dwellers during times of crisis. Urban communities seem more likely to suffer significant losses in unnatural catastrophes, from infrastructure failure to terror threats due to their high population density. The ensuing collection of research and product design examines how resilience can be at its greatest in urban environments, and how city spaces, diverse populations, and the expansive interpersonal networks that arise therein can be used to create cultures of preparedness at individual, interpersonal, and community scales.

Through her thesis, Hysterical Women: Designing Experiences to Counter the Current Gaslighting Healthcare System, Rhea Bhandari aims to elevate the healthcare experience of women by designing more efficient and empathetic diagnostic and treatment strategies, and providing women with new tools with which to track and communicate their symptoms.

After learning of food deserts and food insecurity in New York, Danish designer Gustav Dyrhauge quickly decided to dedicate his thesis, Food Justice: Through the Power of Knowledge Sharing, to food justice and the problem of food insecurity. He designed workshops, services, and experiences in collaboration with Brooklyn youth, towards the goal of job security, food security, and the celebration of cultural heritage through culturally-appropriate food.

In her thesis Prosumerism: Crafting Alternate Consumption Experiences, Sowmya Iyer explores whether products and services can ease the consumer’s guilt of excessive spending and materialism by providing them with options that best fit their values of sustainability. She also wanted to find out if these products/services could be adaptive to the consumer’s lifestyle and built for their convenience. As part of her research process, Sowmya spoke to researchers, innovators, educators, authors, and artists exploring ways to reduce the effects of modern consumerism on the environment.

Manako Tamura has spent the last year trying to reconcile her experience as an assimilated immigrant of color by interviewing, designing for and reflecting with the generation 1.5 immigrants of color who, like her, migrated to the US in the most formative years of their identities. Going into this journey, she first thought her thesis was going to be about transnationalism, where the main tension she had to resolve was around immigrants’ countries of origin and their adopted homelands. “As I spoke with users and experts on the subject, it became clear that the real tensions had to do with the transactional nature of assimilation where,” she reveals, “one could not embody both American and another culture.”

Bernice Wong’s thesis, In Equality: Migration, Labor, and Our Modern Global Economy, explores our relationship and role in the interconnected systems that allow some to prosper and others to suffer exploitation or enslavement. She traces the state of labor rights in today’s American agricultural industry back in time to the abolition of slavery in 1865, understanding that agriculture in the U.S. remains rooted in a system historically intended to control and repress the black body. Her design projects seek to intervene where there are structures of abuse, confronting the issues of immigration, exoticism, colonization, and race as intersected and inseparable.

In his thesis GENTLEmen: Challenging Adults to Raise Feminine Boys, Andrew Schlesinger explores gender identity, masculinity, stereotyping, parenting, education, and male culture. Andrew has been investigating the restrictive nature placed on men and the necessity for them to conform to a masculine ideal, which is destructive to themselves and those around them. Through the feminist movement, most would acknowledge there has been a significant approach towards teaching girls traditionally masculine traits. This thesis argues we need a similar, foundational shift to teach boys feminine traits.

Marianna Mezhibovkaya's Masters thesis, Outsiders: Designing Engagement With the Incarcerated, explores how design can foster compassion for the marginalized and disenfranchised incarcerated population through the creation of social support services and products.

The objective of Adem Önalan’s master’s thesis, Vakit: On the Elasticity and Subjectivity of Time, is to reframe our relationship with time—identifying opportunities that lead people to spend time well—from recontextualizing time, to slowing it down through meaningful, memorable life experiences.

In order to become more brave and confident, MFA Products of Design student Eden Lew embarked on a year-long experiment to become a better designer by learning the ways of a criminal mastermind.

In her thesis, Masterminds and the Art of Misbehaving, Eden’s definition of a criminal mastermind alludes to the romanticized sector of criminals—including burglars, con men, hackers and heist planners. They are con artists who persuade victims into giving up money and valuables. They are craftsmen and tinkerers who decipher the mechanics of systems in order to later break them down. They are hackers who write inventive code to go around highly-secured firewalls, and drug cartel kingpins who run businesses as effectively as CEOs of major corporations.

Products of Design MFA graduate Souvik Paul’s thesis, Unbound, seeks to empower individuals with spinal cord injuries and disorders (SCI/D), and to tackle some of shortcomings in treatment paradigms for SCI. His thesis journey began—violently—two weeks before his arrival at Products of Design in the fall of 2015. While driving her SUV down a California freeway, Souvik’s close friend, Carina, was rear-ended by a tractor-trailer and paralyzed, sustaining a spinal cord injury in the T2/T3 vertebrae. When visiting her in the hospital, Souvik saw how painful her adjustment to life in a wheelchair was. Believing in the power of design to help his friend, Souvik used his thesis as an opportunity to investigate how design could assist people with spinal cord injuries to recapture their sense of agency and identity in the face of such massive physical and emotional trauma.

Jon Lung's master's thesis, At the Ready, is an inquiry into "preparedness" in all its forms—from the fancifully speculative, to the soberly real. It traverses the many boundaries of design in order to understand how to better fortify oneself for the ever-changing challenges that life throws our way. His thesis journey started at the individual scale—focusing on how he could better prepare himself personally. As the project continued, he looked at how he could use his skills and abilities to help those he cared about. And toward the end of his thesis journey, he concentrated less on the objects of preparedness, and more on the requisite skills.