communication

"To close the gap between an individual's felt sustainable and environmental values and performed behaviors, this thesis explores current visual and digital communication paradigms in the United States. This paradigm fuels a demanding attention economy that perpetuates climate anxiety, green fatigue, and audience disengagement from vital climate and environmental communications. Through design thinking, while leveraging systems thinking, this thesis explores sound-centric communications as a tool to foster holistic reception of sustainability communication with an ultimate goal to motivate individuals to adopt sustainable behaviors. This project considers audio in both form and narrative. Deep listening, facilitating connectivity with nature, along with emotional and systems thinking-based reflection are utilized to render sustainability narratives personable and achievable. This strategy is shaped by self-determination theory and self-actualization processes. Audio forms include field recordings, spoken reflections, and data sonification. A case study on storm drains in relation to watershed health drive this project's narrative subject through the Adopt-a-Drain program's impact within Nine Mile Creek watershed district in Minnesota. Through creating and surveying audio assets, this project determines there is potential for local and community-driven sustainability efforts and organizations to utilize experiential audio to engage an audience. Survey results demonstrate heightened interest in joining the Adopt-a-Drain program in response to audio assets. This thesis prototypes a QR coded sign posted at a storm drain in Nine Mile Creek watershed's district, prompting individuals to consider where water flows from local storm drains, linking to a website that presents an audio experience synthesizing the surveyed audio assets. This thesis process posits that this prototype could serve to reach audiences more effectively than digital modes of sharing audio may. This thesis will lead to the testing and implementation of this prototype."

Language—both spoken and written—has, is, and always will be susceptible to spin, manipulation, obfuscation, and misinterpretation. This paper explores how communication's inherent vulnerability has long formed the core of my conceptual inquiry. As a visual artist, I am a tireless experimenter—with both ideas and materials. The foundation of my interdisciplinary practice is my artist's books, which have been referred to as "patchwork quilts of the subconscious." Projects related to my book practice include performance videos along with text-based drawings, paintings, and sculpture that may be characterized as both personal and social critiques. As the inherent nature of humans remains impulsive and fallible, these works may illuminate our unconscious reluctance to convert rational awareness into a more positive and sustainable life practice. My final thesis project will demonstrate emboldened approaches to these facets of my practice. I will present up to thirty new artist's book entries, a dozen new hand-sculpted UNBOUND book prints (up to 7 x 10 feet), five new text-based works on paper and canvas, and one new wall sculpture fabricated in mirrored stainless steel.

As a graphic designer, I speak through visuals. Typography, Motion Graphics, Prints, Photography...anything that you see in the room or street around you. I am a person who explores and tries different fields and multimedia to design and express my own personality and thoughts, create new environments and spaces and create new visual effects and interactive experiences. My main focus is always communication, as motivation for this work. Firstly, I want to present my own understanding and expression of communication such as using my own features to apply it to develop traditional Chinese characters. Secondly, in the process of integrating different languages to facilitate communication between different countries, I also want to explore and discover the evolution of language.

Different media have created more diversity in design to present the vast variety of approaches in graphic design. In this paper, I will demonstrate through research and contemporary examples how Graphic Design and Multimedia can be used as an investigative process to delve deeper into social and cultural conflicts. To do this I will define Visual Language and Multiculturalism, and how these concepts work in tandem to guide the transmission of content; demonstrate the possibilities for connections between people, by pairing universal human senses with the expansive capacities of new technology presented through the use of Multimedia; discuss how these possibilities for connection influence my design process as a Graphic Designer in the development of new tools to enhance these audience connections; and finally, I will synthesize how these concepts converge to become a New World Language, as a means of communication among all media languages, breaking the mono-channel communication pattern of traditional media. As media has evolved with technological advancements, so should Graphic Design and its uses; it is capable of doing more than creating "good-looking" things--it should touch upon social responsibilities, encourage social change, and equality.

For my thesis project, I use the word/object as a canvas to imprint my analysis of the cultural rifts generated when we position ourselves in an unrelated cultural context, using handwriting to address a more personal take on the way we communicate via the written word. The text presented is an original poem written in both Spanish and English that will reflect on my personal experience as a Colombian now living in the United States. The thread that joins a word and its meaning is susceptible to alterations when subjected to translation into a different language. I posit the notion that even when we do not understand each other's language, we all have a story to tell and have more things in common than we realize.