The question that differentiates design and design research from other disciplines, in my experience, is the question “how?”—as in, how might we? Answering this question requires a leap into the unknown—the abstract, intuitive space between what is and what might be—from which one returns with an object, an idea, a provocation that helps us see the world in new ways. Some have, thusly, described design as ontological and world building.¹ The thesis work of this 2024 MDes cohort reflects a desire to find more caring, ethical, and sustainable ways to be. Several themes unite the projects like exploring emergent economic systems and supporting health, intimacy, and safety. Their projects construct alternate worlds, subtle and inviting enough to maintain a sense of being earnest, which gently ask questions about how design can build stronger relationships, foster what makes humans, human, bolster safety and agency, and imagine sustainable economies. Taken together their work demonstrates a gentile optimism through a prismatic or diffracted view of a world that is softer, critical, caring, and conscious.

Several projects were united by a politics of caring and wellbeing. Care, as a concept, is often deployed illuminate alternative, relational values. Care illuminates the value of caring motivation, bodily and emotional reasoning, relationship building, repair, and can also highlight the gendered politics of care work.² In the following thesis projects feel oriented by an attention to care and the type of worlds it can bring to light. Min Jung’s work was inspired by missing her family who live across the United States and South Korea, and wanting to design to enhance a feeling of togetherness. To these ends, she developed a home IoT device for distant families to share everyday moments across vast distances using sound. Her final artifact references a message in a bottle. Messages in a bottle are romantic, there is no way to aim them as they float across great distances, depositing messages on far-away shores. Her thesis gives a similar feeling of poetic whimsey and open-endedness. She created a bottle that, when uncorked, plays soundscapes of everyday home-life between distant family members. The sounds it plays are the everyday sounds one might forget they’d heard before, like the sound of cooking, or slippers scuffling around a tiled floor, or a shared holiday meal. This design asks one to reflect on the quiet accumulations of love, the simple things that collectively build a good life of care and connection. In another project centered around building communication for care,

Ann Mathew designed a card game that facilitates therapeutic conversations for people with early to mid-stage dementia. As part of her thesis research, Ann worked as a design volunteer at The Memory Hub, a vibrant place dedicated to building community for people with Alzheimer’s and dementia. Ann recounted that working at the center left her heart overflowing, and she wanted to give back in an immediate way. Over time, she learned that conversation, especially certain types of conversations, helped folks with dementia by giving them opportunities to tell their stories, remember their lives, and revisit core memories and important people. To facilitate such conversations, she crafted a beautiful card game called Life’s Tapestry. The cards hold questions prompts from ice breakers, to family history, childhood memories, and advice. Ann’s design emphasizes the importance of conversation and of treating a person as a whole person, not just a condition. The care that is scaffolded into these cards enables relationships to emerge quickly, with an air of play, in ways that building mutually enjoyable connections while slowing dementia progression. Ann is not the only student who noted the value of designing for conversations.

In her thesis, Maya Kaneko focused on holding conversation around the taboo topic of menopause. Menopause sits at the confluence of many justice issues like reproductive health, feminism, and aging, and while it impacts over half of the population for up to 10 years of their lives, it remains understudied and socially invisible. As she ran focus groups and studies with younger and older women, Maya was confounded by the lack of discussion about menopause and found a huge gaps in knowledge both about how to navigate menopause individually, as well as how to support those who are undergoing menopause. She designed a magazine to hold the dialogue and anecdotes she’d collected. Printed on newsprint in a small format, the magazine is designed to embody a feeling of casual everyday-ness. Maya imagined these magazines represent a world where discussing the taboo subject of menopause is easy and normal. This material provocation is gentle, not grandiose, and represents a wish for different values and priorities, like everyday support for and discussion surrounding menopause.

Finally, with a background in industrial design for the outdoors, Kris Brauer’s thesis designs for increased for success and safety in avalanche rescue. After an avalanche, shock, and adrenaline complicate rescue efforts, as most skiers or backcountry athletes are most likely under-practiced in avalanche rescue response. Meanwhile, managing time is imperative, as rescuers have a 10-to-15-minute window to find and exhume the snow-entombed person. By observing and analyzing video from live, simulated rescues which he organized, Kris identified moments of friction and disorganization in rescue efforts. He addressed them through designing an avalanche-rescue-focused backcountry backpack. His research yielded more general safety design heuristics such as: clarity, then hierarchy and constructing holistic views of safety which stem from a larger sensitivity to how safety is part of a chain of decisions made over time. For example, wearing sunscreen, eating enough food, and staying hydrated. Ultimately, he suggests designers realize that it is not a singular moment which results in safety, it is the choices that we make along the way that guide us into safer outcomes. Another subset of designs surface emerging economic systems. Digital platforms and artificial intelligence are ‘disrupting’ our current economic assemblages, for the better and the worse. In the following projects, economic systems are both reimagined and probed to discover the emergent ways these systems might reimagine or shape everyday life.

In Bill Xiong’s thesis, he designed a service called Loop Lab which bolsters the emerging circular economy around upcycling clothes. This intervention represents a shift in thinking about consumption which tangentially tackles the problem of waste that fast fashion generates. Instead of copying or improving on existing services like Poshmark or Grailed, Bill pivoted to developing a resale service layered on top of the existing clothes repair program run by The North Face. Bill’s service design allows people to return and buy used garments through the brand which reduces the burden of creating listings on sellers. Loop Lab also integrates NFC chips (which enable tap-based communication between an object and phone), as a way to track the history of the garment. This enables companies and consumers to trace the age, repair, and ownership history of the object for faster assessment of its value. Overall, the project showcases how service design can shift and reconfigure social and economic ecologies of fashion: for example, clothes resellers Bill interviewed explained how they saw their closets as living investments that could be repaired, cared for, and liquidated and moved into new investment pieces, in other words, this intervention catalyzes and expands new way of thinking of clothing consumption that foreground circular economies of reuse and repair.

Finally, Wyatt Olson’s thesis crafts design fictions through short films that explore the emerging confluence of commerce, location data, and AI recommenders. Unlike blatantly dystopian provocations like Black Mirror, Wyatt’s films hover in the realm of neutrality. This was intentional, both evoking the near-present and highly-probable, while also requiring viewers to grapple with their ethical implications without clear guidance. Four films trace different scenarios set in hushed scenes of everyday life where a person’s day to day world is shaped and tracked by location-based recommender technologies. To expose the invisible influence, Wyatt displays some of the normally ‘unseen’ function of the technology in text-based overlays—making their normally black-boxed inner-workings visible. The technologies seem helpful at first, suggesting products, routes, or collecting safety information, but slowly, they become slightly insidious: constraining possibilities, shaping perceptions of the world, and penalizing wrong actions. One can see how promises of efficiency become infringements on will, autonomy, and privacy. When asked why he chose dystopia, not utopia, and Wyatt pondered the impact of materializing these scenarios. Was he just reinforcing unwanted outcomes? But seen collectively with the other works of his cohort, it seems a combination of many types of stories, from stories that serve as warnings (like Wyatt's) as well as stories that imagine otherwise, are both useful exercises and have synergistic effects.

Looking at these projects together, I was again struck by the craftsmanship of provocations and subtle world building which animate them. In contrast to heavy-handed or overly speculative work, this collection strikes a balance that feels down-to-earth and earnest. The works ask vital questions about where design can enhance and expand human connection and places where it might be limiting or infringe on autonomy and will. These projects materialize, expose, and reorganize, and make the invisible visible, toward caring, sustainable, just, and equitable ways of being. And the deep thinking and high-fidelity output of the work is no easy feat—it reflects the melding of many interlinked competencies (conceptual, material, and aesthetic) that make contemporary design such a powerful and unique field. Design theorists Anne Marie Willis and Tony Fry both discuss the ontological and world building nature of design.
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