Alan Amaya

Queer Mart

Queer Mart is an interactive AR tool that services the LGBTQ+ community as a platform for sharing play spaces and empowering queer folk with necessities for living. A series of 3D scanning workshops in a local neighborhood generated the tool kit for participatory community engagement as a process for prototype development.

ANNIE ZHIYAN WANG

Thermoverse

Thermoverse uses digitized thermal traces from physical objects such as public seats to capture subtle interactions in a community, redefining both digitally and physically enabled relationships. These visualized interactions prompt discussions about the future of virtual relationships, paving the way for new forms of social interaction in virtual reality.

BLAKE SHAE KOS

Sonus

Sonus is an audio-based social network composed of time-sensitive, location-based voice recordings created by public participants. The posts of these participants accumulate as mixed-reality clouds that correspond to the qualities and expression of the content. The collective effect is – both visibly and sonically – a form of “social weather.”

GUOWEI LYU

ChatESP

Text-to-creation AI models cannot interpret aspects of language that are not directly visual, such as past and future tense. Based on a multidisciplinary exploration temporal representation, this project creates unanticipated and non-pragmatic simulations of possible AI-enabled interpretations of language to creation, thus inviting speculation about AI’s potential influence on our understanding of central tenets of language itself.

MIAOQIONG HUANG

Twin

Personal data is an extension of our digital identity, and as the creation of our “digital twins” continues, our actual identity and digital presence are at risk. Twin is a game that explores the prevention of identity loss through the directing and resisting of attention to digital content.

NANYI JIANG

Substrate Fantasia

Substrate Fantasia is a speculative fabulation of a substrate-centered world called Substratocene in 2180 – a transitional era between current Anthropocene towards an ecological utopia. This work challenges the anthropocentric and exploitive modes of production by proposing a future experience that enables cultural and genetic co-evolution with non-human others as companions.

Noah Curtis

Coins

Coins explores the concept of value today – a time not only of crypto, but an age when links connecting currencies with tangible commodities have long vanished. Four speculative currencies represent different interpretations of how physical money might be manifest today or in a near-future – each driven by different values, sentiments and materials.

SHIYI CHEN

Emotional Auto-Correct

Emotional Auto-Correct reframes emotional performance in the near future by exploring how the resolution of facial expressions can be modified by AI, based on preference and needs. Because interventions like this may erode authenticity and emotional intelligence, a “lounge mode” provides a self-curated space for emotional regulation and how we might explore entirely new forms of performed and spontaneous emotions.

Tao Liu

Flesh Morph

Flesh Morph is a proposal for wearable “flesh” to modify and enhance the functionality of the body. This world centers the standardization of the body, and the objecthood and materiality of the human body is emphasized. Here, flesh itself is used as a material, and the flesh-made-products are commonplace.

Tingyi Li

Beyond Umwelt

Beyond Umwelt challenges the conventions of human-centered sensing. It proposes an expansion of the boundaries of what senses are considered “human” with the Sensory-Expansion Suit – jacket, vest, and necklace. New aesthetics emerge from the affordances of this form of body enhancement, which provides a framework for a new form of communication.

Yining Gao

Inter-face

Inter-face is a wearable facial device that enhances intimacy through physically mediated interactions. Today, and in the future as population declines, people will lack opportunities to engage with other individuals in person, and will become unfamiliar with socializing physically. Inter-face introduces and modulates rules and principles to help people to interact face-to-face, even guiding them to find life partners.

Yiran Mao

Gardening Mod!

Gardening Mod! expands Grand Theft Auto online by giving the game’s plants – each paired with a physical plant in real life – a proxy for their care needs. Players are equipped with special controllers to perform these digital/physical tasks, such as watering and trimming, and can earn rewards by pursuing these needy plants in the crazy GTA world of Los Santos.

Zhuoyu Li

Squirrel Ark Institute of Technology

Squirrel Ark Institute of Technology is a virtual reality journey that invites you to traverse the whimsical, peculiar, and oddly captivating world of squirrels. Delve into their idiosyncratic behavior and social intricacies, uncover the hidden facets of squirrel cognition, and revel in the marvelous interconnectedness of all life forms.

ZOEY ZHENG WANG

Stimulation Sleeve

Stimulation Sleeve is a low-frequency electrical device that foregrounds and concentrates the role of self-stimulation in human body. This challenges the definition of stimulation and raises speculative discussion about its characteristics, based on Gayle Rubin’s theory of “benign sexual variation”. Stimulation Sleeve is a concentrated expression of people’s self-stimulation compulsion, a generative, seductive, electric experience.

Guest Respondents

Claire L. Evans

Claire L. Evans is a writer and musician exploring ecology, technology, and culture.

She is the singer of the Grammy-nominated pop group YACHT, co-founder of VICE’s imprint for speculative fiction, Terraform, and co-editor, with Brian Merchant, of the accompanying anthology Terraform: Watch Worlds Burn (MCD Books, 2022). Her 2018 history of women in computing, Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet, published by Penguin Random House, has been translated into six languages.

Her writing has appeared in The Verge, VICE, Rhizome.org, MIT Technology Review, Pioneer Works’ Broadcast, Frieze, The Guardian, Document Journal, Eye on Design, Aeon, and Grow, where she writes a regular column exploring the overlaps between computation and biology. Her 2022 profile of the lost hacker Susy Thunder was nominated for an ASME Award; a feature film adaptation of the story is in development at Paramount Pictures.

She has given invited talks at the Hirshhorn Museum, Walker Art Center, TEDx, La Gaité Lyrique, Google I/O, The New Museum, XOXO Festival, MUTEK, Goethe Institut, Manchester International Festival, SXSW, Gray Area, Neural Information Processing Systems, the Association for Computational Linguistics, and the Decentralized Web Summit, among others.

Robert Kett PhD

Robert Kett is an anthropologist and curator of design and Assistant Professor of Humanities & Sciences at ArtCenter. He has previously taught at UC Berkeley and the California College of the Arts and held positions at SFMOMA, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, and the Getty Research Institute. He earned his doctorate in Anthropology at the University of California, Irvine and his bachelor’s degree at Northwestern University.

Working across California and Latin America, Kett’s projects have examined design/technology intersections; countercultural and vernacular design; and the place of indigeneity in modern aesthetic and knowledge practices. His writing has been published in Representations, Design Observer Quarterly, Getty Research Journal, Curator: The Museum Journal, Los Angeles Magazine, and other publications and he is coauthor of Learning by Doing at the Farm: Craft, Science, and Counterculture in Modern California (Soberscove Press, 2014). Recent exhibition projects include Fabien Cappello: Sillas Callejeras/Street Chairs (UC Berkeley), Designed in California (SFMOMA, 2018) and MEXICO 68: Design and Dissent (SFMOMA, 2018). Kett’s work has been supported by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Smithsonian Institution, UC MEXUS, the UC Institute for Research in the Arts, and other institutions.

Thesis is a two-term culminating project for every graduating student in MDP at ArtCenter: an MFA in emerging technologies, critical frameworks, and experimental studio practices. This personal project is where students take interdisciplinary methods and actively define new design opportunities / territories through research and engagement with diverse social, cultural and technological contexts. Students synthesize their work through a series of classes, committee advisement meetings (one-on-one and group), lectures, presentations and reviews.

Thesis Core Faculty
Elizabeth Chin
Elise Co (Studio Lead)
Sam Creely
Sean Donahue
Tim Durfee (Studio Lead)
Maggie Hendrie
Ben Hooker (Studio Lead)

​​Adjunct Advisors
Benjamin Borden
John Brumley
Claire Evans
Umi Hsu
Robert Kett
Zane Mecham
Mike Milley
Jenny Rodenhouse
Mimi Zeiger

Graphic Design
Jennifer Rider Studio

Exhibition Design
Tim Durfee Studio