I am an interdisciplinary artist, educator and writer from Southern California. My practice explores the ways in which images, text and even something as complex as human identity are all made up of fragmented parts that work together to establish visual narrative. Working across multiple media, I create artworks that are lyrical and chaotic and place them in highly aestheticized conditions. My work depicts universal themes of love, loss and resilience over social and political oppression. Additionally, my work questions ideas of social and personal validity, agency and the visually queer.

A recent study identified that approximately one in four women in the United States has experienced physical violence by an intimate partner during her lifetime, equaling approximately twenty-nine million women (Black, et al., 2011). Victims of domestic violence often are isolated and controlled by their partners and made to feel helpless and imprisoned. Domestic violence shelters can provide a safe place for women to heal and begin again, and these shelters often have the goal of empowering their residents so that residents can begin to make positive life changes (Gengler, 2012). Sheilds (1995) has identified three themes that characterize women's empowerment: • the development of a strong sense of self; • the ability to base decisions on that sense of self; and, • a connection within a larger community. Many domestic violence shelters have empowerment programs; however, some researchers note that many "empowering" domestic violence shelter programs have an overabundance of rules and restrictions that residents may view as controlling or patronizing (Gengler, 2012; VanNatta, 2010). Recently, many contemporary domestic violence shelters have begun to move away from this type of environment and replace it with a minimal rules policy (Tautfest, n.d.). This interior environment study was driven by the notion held by some researchers that rules and restrictions are often created in response to the built environment, prompted in part by the many challenges of housing multiple people in one location (Tautfest, n.d.). It is therefore possible that the design of shelter built environments may create unnecessary rules or improperly respond to minimal rules policies that in turn can negatively affect empowerment. This study sought to understand if domestic violence shelters might be better designed when empowerment is the goal. Interviews with domestic violence shelter staff focused on the current shelter's minimal rules policy and shelter architectural design in relation to resident empowerment. Sheilds' themes of empowerment were used as an underlying framework throughout the study. Shelter staff members interviewed believed the built environment supported their minimal rules policy. However, findings suggested the need for defined quiet spaces and structured design solutions that better support the minimal rules policy, particularly in the kitchen area. Interviews also revealed that the study's shelter could benefit from more areas that support resident goal setting and decision-making. The existing built environment supported resident identity formation and community well. The interviews led to the creation of a proposed design solution for a hypothetical domestic violence shelter as well as design guidelines intended to assist the creation of future shelters. The guidelines and resulting design focus on resident empowerment and supporting a minimal rules environment by designing to accommodate multiple users and functions. Some highlights of the design include custom storage and display space in resident bedrooms that encourage personalization and identity formation, large community areas with flexible furniture, and a myriad of quiet spaces that support resident decision-making and goal setting. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of Interior Design in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts. / Summer Semester 2015. / June 19, 2015. / domestic violence, domestic violence victim, empowerment, interior design, rules, shelter / Includes bibliographical references. / Jill Pable, Professor Directing Thesis; Marlo Ransdell, Committee Member; Kenan Fishburne, Committee Member.

In the United States, the number of people in the over 65 year category will rise to 80 million, or 20% of the total population by 2040 (Palmore, 2009). This older group traditionally requires more services ranging from healthcare to housing than younger generations. Skilled nursing facilities provide long-term care for older adults who need around the clock nursing support, and are likewise increasing in number to accommodate this change. One of the challenges facing retirement communities is respecting residents' rights of autonomy and control while still following the many required laws and regulations placed on skilled nursing establishments (Frank, 2002). Administrators often desire to create a home-like environment, but the setting may still interfere with residents' ability to make personal choices, which is an essential component associated with empowerment in the home (Frank, 2002). Given the value of stories in revealing hopes, dreams and perceptions, some researchers suggest that narrative inquiry is a valuable technique for gathering data in studies of the elderly. There is an advantage of older adults presenting their views on life: researchers can gain a better grasp of the needs of any individual by accessing his or her personal accounts of the aging experience (Harrigan & Raiser, 1998). This study explored the built environment's role in perceived empowerment by skilled nursing residents. Literature suggests that a sense of control, choice, and autonomy are factors that can determine if an older resident is satisfied with their living conditions that, in turn, may facilitate empowerment and overall well-being. This concept is the foundation for the study's primary research question: What role do empowering elements in the built environment play in supporting quality of life for skilled nursing residents? The Person-Environment (P-E) Fit Theory by Kahana, Lovegreen, Kahana, & Kahana shaped the study's approach (2003), which evaluates the interaction of personal preferences and environmental characteristics along the following four physical and two social domains: Physical Amenities/Aesthetics, Resource Amenities, Safety, Stimulation/Peacefulness, Homogeneity/Heterogeneity, and Interaction/Solitude. As the name suggests, the goal is to have a positive "fit" of the preferences and characteristics that leads to resident satisfaction and psychological well-being (Kahana et al., 2003). The research study was comprised of two phases. The first phase involved interviewing skilled nursing residents which allowed them to share stories with the researcher of their lived experience in their long-term care facilities. They were asked about their perceptions of the spaces in the facilities that the residents determined to be empowering. The second phase took the form of observation mapping in which the researcher tracked the movement and activities of the general population of residents in the common areas of the study's two site facilities. Through the residents' stories and site observations, this study reviewed a range of residents' lived experiences from roommate relations to favorite pastimes to quiet moments. The P-E Fit theory domains proved a helpful model to understand certain physical aspects of empowerment in skilled nursing facilities. However, those domains were not able to fully explain some of the psychosocial concepts that residents expressed, which they perceived to be beneficial. The researcher discovered emerging themes for empowerment that combined both the physical findings as supported by the P-E Fit domains and these additional psychosocial findings that included personal relationships, sense of belonging, sense of identity, and knowledge of community culture. The emerging themes lead to the development of ten guidelines for skilled nursing facilities that identify and recommend empowering elements in the built environment. These included resident room equals home; centralized place to access resources, freedom to access community spaces, centralized social gathering spaces, places for retreat, connection to nature, off-campus adventures, places to explore personal interests, sense of belonging, and safety. The intent is that these guidelines will benefit skilled nursing facility administrators, staff, and other design professionals who seek to empower and improve quality of life for older adults. / A Thesis submitted to the Department of Interior Design in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts. / Summer Semester 2015. / June 29, 2015. / Aging, Built environment, Empowerment, Older adults, Quality of life, Skilled nursing homes / Includes bibliographical references. / Jill Pable, Professor Directing Thesis; Lisa Waxman, Committee Member; Amy Huber, Committee Member.

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Within the global South, the public realm is often characterised as a territory of intense accessibility and spatial claims, equally enabling and constricting citizens to shape and reshape an inclusive place within the informal city. The contemporary African city has been central to the discourse around the rapidity of urban development and influx, producing a global narrative of the inability of a frail postcolonial metropolis to support this growth. What is emerging, however, is the resulting improvisation of the city’s inhabitants to reimagine their contrasting, everyday environments for the city’s negotiation and daily navigation. Often, the global discourse omits the finer, more nuanced informality of life that the African city’s marginalised users employ in the everyday to innovatively sustain their livelihood. Central to this imagination, is the Designer’s role to spatially represent all citizens within the urban arena; achieving this through the People’s City design approach. This participatory, incremental approach produces innovation outside the preconceived idea of a design product; rather, pursuing the process over the product. If more than half the city is marginal, the role facing practice should be framing solutions from the perspective and design of citizen/community majority. As Hamdi observes, the integrity of developing an inclusive approach in design, is through the collective voice and experience from within the community context itself; “practice, then, is about making the ordinary special and the special more widely accessible - expanding the boundaries of understanding and possibility with vision and common sense... It is about getting it right for now and at the same time being tactical and strategic about later” (Hamdi, 2004). Manenberg, Cape Town, provides insight into the negotiation of community spaces; where form-making operates outside of the regular and explores how previous areas of exclusion contribute to an emergence of a more flexible and adaptable city. Rather than the static public realm, Manenberg demonstrates “a temporal articulation and occupation of space which not only creates a richer sensibility of spatial occupation, but also suggests how spatial limits are expanded to include formally unimagined uses in dense urban conditions” (Mehrotra, 2010). These unimagined, informal spatial nuances become the co-construction of choice and improvisation that composes daily life. This collaboration and co-constructing of place formed the catalyst from which the research project pursues the process over the product, and was the key in developing an action research methodology to partnering and co-design with community members. The overarching thread that this research project attempts to explore in its approach, is: how can designers intervene in a manner which creatively alters the persistent dominance of exclusion in the public realm? And, in doing so, can the community be invited into the process? Throughout this iterative design, three principles emerged: People, power and place; through these the design process could be interrogated across multiple scales, with participants establishing outcomes, diagnosing spatial negotiations and dreaming proposed interventions. The co-design process in the research project required active engagement, where the participants explored values, issues, threats and opportunities relating to the principles through a series of three process stages: Diagnosis, Dreaming and Designing. The intention was to allow the question of what the community wanted to emerge from within the groups. This process framework provides an opportunity for the group members to revisit their visioning iteratively during each process stage, testing and negotiating decisions of how interventions can be achieved. It allows the participants a space to comprehend urban solutions and explore alternatives, responding to on-the-ground issues from local and nuanced experience. Answering questions communities are not asking: this subtitle becomes a commentary, or perhaps a statement, on how previous areas of exclusion, the marginalised and the informal city, often do not have a voice in the conversation of how their spaces are conceived and designed for them, without them. The research project concludes with strategies of intervention, with outcomes and solutions generated from the process of co-design. These strategies were then transposed into incremental interventions, testing the greatest impact to alter the accessibility of the public realm. The greatest tool to emerge from the community-led approach was the identification of potential partnerships which strengthened the dynamics in negotiating the public realm; illustrating that if communities are offered a seat at the table, the designs become all the richer, participating in the emergence of a more flexible, incremental and adaptable city.

Avec les nouvelles réalités économiques et sociales du 21ème siècle dans le contexte de l'émergence de l'économie et de la société du savoir, l'employabilité est devenue un élément majeur de l'agenda politique national et supranational dans le monde entier. De plus, les orientations économiques et sociales de la mondialisation, la mobilité accrue des travailleurs et un accès facilité à l'éducation ont donné lieu à des perspectives de carrière modifiées de sorte que, en ce qui concerne la gestion de carrière, la tâche incombe plutôt à l'individu. L'émergence de l'économie du savoir, notamment, a relancé un débat qui a été latent depuis les années 60 autour de la façon dont les institutions de l'enseignement supérieur contribuent au développement du capital humain nécessaire au progrès social et économique. Même si ceci est reconnu comme un problème depuis des décennies, l'écart entre les besoins du marché du travail actuel et le profil des nouveaux diplômés qui entrent dans le monde du travail semble rester un sujet de discussion.La construction de l'employabilité (notamment la définition du concept d’employabilité) a évolué au cours des dernières décennies. De nombreuses études sur le sujet ont analysé sa nature très complexe et en constante évolution. A ce jour cependant, sa définition souffre encore d'ambiguïté; ce qui complique le développement d’outils efficaces dans le domaine de l'enseignement supérieur, nécessaires à la mise en œuvre et à l’évaluation de mécanismes relatifs à l’employabilité. Dans cette recherche, le concept de l'employabilité est holistique et prend en compte trois paramètres : les facteurs intrinsèques, les facteurs extrinsèques et sa nature actionnable. Cinq thèmes d'activités dans les établissements d'enseignement supérieur ont été identifiés pour traiter efficacement l'employabilité: le curriculum, les services de soutien, les relations avec l’industrie, la mesure de la qualité et le leadership. La conceptualisation holistique et les cinq thèmes formeront la base de la recherche de cette étude qui vise à fournir plus de clarté sur la façon dont l’employabilité peut effectivement être traitée dans le contexte de l'enseignement supérieur et de la façon dont elle peut être évaluée.Suivant une méthodologie de recherche appelée Design Science, à travers une analyse qualitative de trois études de cas soigneusement sélectionnées, un examen approfondi de la littérature et l’application d’une technique Delphi, cette étude aboutit à la proposition finale du développement d’un modèle de développement et de maturité pour l’employabilité « Employability Development and Assessment Maturity Model (EDAMM) » qui fournit un mécanisme de diagnostic validé pour évaluer une institution d’enseignement supérieur dans sa capacité d’offre en termes d’employabilité. / In light of the new economic and societal realities of the 21st Century against the backdrop of the emergence of the knowledge economy and the knowledge society, employability has become a major item on the national and supranational political agenda around the world. Additionally, economic and societal trends of globalization, increased mobility of labour and increased access to education have resulted in changed career perspectives whereby the onus has shifted to the individual in terms of career management. The emergence of the knowledge economy in particular has re-ignited a debate that has been latent since the 60’s around how well Higher Education Institutions deliver on their contribution to the development of the human capital required for societal and economic progress. Even though acknowledged as an issue for decades, the gap between the current labour market requirements and the profile of new graduates that enter the world of work seems to remain a topic of discussion.The construct of employability has evolved over the last few decades whereby extensive studies on the topic have illuminated its highly complex, relative and continuously evolving nature. Up to date however, the construct still suffers from ambiguity around what it is; hence complicating the development of effective Higher Education approaches to address it. For this study the construct of employability will be holistically approached by means of three influencing factors of intrinsic, extrinsic and actionable nature. Five themes of activities in Higher Education Institutions have been identified to hold strong potential to effectively address employability: curriculum, support services, employer engagement, quality measurement and leadership. The holistic conceptualization and the five themes will form the basis of this study’s search for clarity around how employability can effectively be addressed in a Higher Education context and how this can be evaluated.Following a Design Science Research methodology, through a qualitative study of three purposefully sampled case studies, extensive literature review and a Delphi Technique, this study outlines the development towards the final proposal of the Employability Development and Assessment Maturity Model (EDAMM) as a validated diagnostic mechanism to evaluate a Higher Education Institution in its fitness for purpose in terms of employability.

This conclusive study is based upon a project of a social awareness campaign designed to reduce screen time in older children and Millennials. This is achieved through the uses of all modern aspects of a campaign: posters, advertisements (social and print), as well as a trio of posters that explain the concept of the campaign. Lastly, this all pulls together with the intended use of both a microsite and mobile app.

Man is increasingly assuming conscious control over his physical environment. The impact of rapidly accelerating scientific and technological progress has resulted in the environment being increasingly man-made and man-influenced. The growing urban population has necessitated building at a rate and quantity greater than ever before. Enormous resources, both human and material, are being channelled on an unprecedented scale into the planning, designing and construction of new environments for human use. Whilst this tide of energy and activity continues to surge forward, creating vast urban and suburban. developments, very little energy and resources have, by comparison, been directed towards critically assessing the impact that these built environments have on people, and the extent to which they are responsive to human needs and aspirations. It has become critical for the architect to be made fully aware of the human implications of the physical environment he is creating. Concern for the human element has been eclipsed by the current pre-occupation of the design profession with technology and economics which have become the dominant design imperatives.

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abstract: As the designer is asked to design, create, or simply solve a problem, many factors go into that process. It generally begins with defining the scope or problem that undergoes an iterative process utilizing different tools and techniques to generate the desired outcome. This is often referred to as the design process. Notwithstanding the many factors that influence this process, this study investigates the use of theory for behavior change and its effect on the design process. While social behavioral theories have been extensively discussed in the realm of design, and a well-developed body of literature exists, there is limited knowledge about how designers respond to and incorporate theory into their design process. Fogg’s persuasive design (2003), Lockton’s design with intent (2009) and Tromp’s social implication framework (2011) stand as exemplars of new strategies developed towards design for behavior change that are able to empower designers’ mindsets, providing them with a uniquely insightful perspective to entice change. Instead of focusing on the effectiveness of the design end product, this study focuses on how theory-driven approaches affect the ideation and framing fragment of the design process. A workshop case study with senior design students was utilized with focused observations and post-workshop interviews to answer the research questions. This study contributes by providing a useful method of documenting a behavioral economics theory to the design process in a workshop setting. It also provides insights on how behavioral change theory application can be incorporated in a segment of the design process. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Design 2019