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This self-directed Thesis design studio is the culmination of the thesis year within the MFA Interior Design Program. The thesis design studio provides an opportunity to further investigate and evaluate theoretical ideas developed in the thesis prep seminar by demonstrating their significance in a self-selected design project. Students work closely with a primary thesis advisor in weekly meetings and are in discussion with each other to discuss common emerging themes as a community of practice.
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: Common Interiors, collective memory, interiors + media, participatory design, interiors of sound, air, water + more-than-human interiors, vulnerable bodies, and site as quarry.
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.
These projects respond to the long period of isolation brought by COVID-19 and ask: how can we be together again? By questioning pre-existing hierarchies, forms of segregation, and the spatial conditions that sustained them, these theses propose interiors that promote safe forms of encounter and engaged interaction while prioritizing mental health and collective care.
Stephanie Po: The 2020 Re-imagined Office: Domesticating the Work Environment
Hannah Martin: Working Well: prioritizing mental health in the modern office design
Sarah-Nicole Elliott: 5th Street Garden: Convergence at the Dead End
These projects make a call to embrace the power of design as a practice of both recovery and reconnaissance. Through an exploration of historical narratives, archives and interactive storytelling, they ask, how can design play a part in translating collective experience into a future-oriented practice? These projects cultivate and celebrate the nuanced layers of culture and history, finding new methods of navigating landscapes that are forever in flux.
Sam Tong: Making Food Make Place: Preservation of Cultural Identity, Self-Orientalism as Resistance & Decoloniality through Food in Manhattan’s Chinatown
Yoojin Doh: Shadowplay in Trauma Setting: Asian American Threshold
Teah Brands: 30 Acts of Museuming: Designs for an Afrofuturist Interior in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn
Thea Attieh: Collective Futures: Speculative scenarios for Beirut
Projects in this group explore the explosively reciprocal relationship between interiors and media, delving into technology’s ability to both heighten and deepen our sensorial awareness, creating new opportunities for transmedia communication. They reflect a mutual interchange between mediums, memory and phenomenology—a poetic reimagining.
Christian Meldrum: Media, Memory and Monetization: A co-working space for cyber-sex laborers
Lamiae El Mourabit: The Memory Threshold: A time scaled allegorical approach to cultural rituals of homemaking in lost interiors
Olga Mironova: Homescreens. Boundaries Between Virtual Public Field and Domestic Material Envelopes
Projects in this group reflect on the designer’s role, moving away from a problem-solving approach to work within active communities to support, facilitate, listen, and care. They build interiority through open frameworks that allow for co-creation, collaboration, flexibility and active participation. In this way, these theses return agency to communities as they reclaim space and shape their neighborhoods.
Yasmina Huckins: Framing Inhabitation: A Counter-Manual Towards Reclaiming Urban Space
Brenda Zawadzki: El habitAR de todos
Sofie Grimstad: An Illusion of Access: Declassifying the constructed environment
These projects understand interiority as negotiated through ecological processes and interconnected systems in which humans and more-than-humans participate. They explore the “invisible” and “intangible” in-between, playing with the material conditions of air, water, and sound to shape interiors that force changes in perception through immersive experiences. In a context of environmental breakdown, these theses invite humans to recognize our imbrication with the environment, acknowledge an expansive and inclusive “we,” and imagine alternative forms of living together.
Justin Sorensen: Avian Opera: Queering a counterpoint of silenced voices at Lincoln Center
Inna Basin: Natural Communion: Human-bird interface for equitable collective healing
Rosie Bartlik: Illuminating the Sonic Envelope
Hana Wilson: Living Through the Storm: Reimagining domestic datum lines for climate change adaptation
These projects propose care as a mode of attention, highlighting how design can shape new forms of human connection through the creation of haptic and inclusive environments. How can design foster meaningful interactions and play a curative role for individuals or communities that have been overlooked or marginalized? These projects articulate the importance of embodied practices across the varied domains of human experience.
Shaila Rizvi: Moving on! Intentional design, joy & Interior futures for Down Syndrome children
G Mallek: Refuge in Placemaking: How Trauma Informed Design and Craft Make Home
Emma O'Keefe: Through a Child’s Eye: Paving a synergy between neuroscience and design
AJ Kushner: (Our) Imminent Domain: Queer Spatial Reclamation and the Temporalities of Collective Care
Ilana Duby + Jonathan Escalante: Body Crafts: Embracing the Public with Imaginative Interior
These projects respond to a culture of constant renewal and consumption by exploring the material possibilities of “waste.” From discarded objects found in their sites to pieces of derelict buildings, these theses engage with material exploration as a generative approach to imagining interiors that stimulate the senses, foster collective rituals, and facilitate new social dynamics. Simultaneously, they expand notions of “sustainability” and “green design” by introducing alternative forms of design renovation.
Renee Peng: Post Consumerism Retail: Visioning the Retail Future
Audrey Bell: Public Discard: Temporal Spatial Practices
Perri Eppie: The Glass Melangerie: Inspiring circularity through curious experimentation
Tanya Puri: Reflective Bodies: A passively designed bath house within the city
Caroline Schurz: Year of De-construction: Imagining Communal Rituals of Demolition
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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