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This year's thesis projects address the current global context of crises through a diversity of topics, tackling issues around inequality, trauma, environmental degradation, and consumerism in a collective pursuit of actively contributing to the world.
As the global pandemic unfolded, this year's theses were conducted remotely. Students overcame the challenge of isolation while embracing their diverse locations and unique contexts, engaging with their local communities and histories. The process began with constellations of interests that progressively intersected and narrowed down into each of their specific thesis topics. Commonalities appeared around theoretical frameworks and research territories, allowing for collaborative explorations and shared discussions around seven areas: domesticity, collective care, queer and non-normative bodies, phenomenology, spatial justice, expanded sustainability, and decoloniality.
During the Spring semester, their rigorous research materialized in thoughtful and relevant design projects, which exemplify the innovative and expansive approach of the MFA ID program. Overall, these thesis projects embrace interior design as a critical and experimental practice able to produce positive contributions to communities, cultures, and ecologies.Â
These projects embrace the political power of interiors in redistributing power, restoring dignity, and healing trauma. As they ask, how can interior design play a role in the construction of spaces for equality and justice? They introduce interior design discourses to conversations on urban/territorial planning, policymaking, and spatial justice.
These projects contest the concepts of "sustainability," "resilience," and "green design" as they operate in the current system. Instead, they seek to expand these concepts as they imagine alternative interiors that promote other forms of conviviality and relationality between humans and more-than-humans.
These projects embrace the call to decolonize design. They start by focusing on the role of the designer, the design process, and the urgent need to incorporate other forms of thinking and doing into the discipline. As they explore decoloniality, these projects unpack the tensions, conflicts, biases, and power dynamics that underlay cross-cultural research and design.
These projects question interiors designed under universal ideals of bodies, usually white, able, straight, and male. Instead, they seek to produce effective inclusivity by focusing on the limitations of ADA legislation, re-defining queer aesthetics, and framing interiority as social infrastructure in favor of diversity.
These theses explore interiority's potential to build collectivity and shape new forms of conviviality. Through theories that address healing and well-being, these projects seek to overcome disconnection brought by trauma, poverty, fast-paced capitalism, and consumerism. In doing so, they propose interiors that foster meaningful interactions and community.
At Parsons School of Constructed Environments (SCE), design is understood as being in a unique position to respond to some of the most pressing issues of our time and that addressing complex problems requires expertise that spans across traditional disciplinary boundaries. From multidisciplinary coursework across the curriculum to the sharing of studio space, students in Parsons’ Masters programs in Architecture, Interior Design, and Lighting Design learn and are exposed to the issues and processes of varied design disciplines throughout their graduate study. Although the benefits and insights of interdisciplinary thinking are evidenced throughout the SCE, the student work included in the Interdisciplinary studio was completed in thesis labs structured to support cross disciplinary problem solving. With student researchers from SCE hybrid degree programs, thesis work features a shared topical framework centered on the integration of lighting design and architecture and lighting design and interior design respectively. This thesis work engages these fields against the boundaries of current practice, while simultaneously questioning the assumptions upon which these professions operate. The quality and understanding represented in this thesis research affirms the SCE belief that addressing the most complex problems of today and tomorrow demands a willingness to engage in critical thinking across disciplinary boundaries.
Committed to amplifying diverse voices, The New School offers more than a thousand public programs and events each year, providing fresh perspectives and unique learning opportunities. These lectures, exhibitions, concerts, and performances feature prominent and emerging artists, activists, and thought leaders.
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