Assembled together are the recent people of my life, a body of portraits that is, in the phrase of Alice Neel, "a collection of souls." This thesis serves to contextualize the work, as well as reflect the process by which it was made, as both an explanation of the portraits it contains and a portrait of myself as the artist who made them. The work is considered from the same viewpoints that humans are: as minds, bodies, and souls, and works to communicate the theme of empathy between humans through the act of painting on each of these levels. Contemporary portraiture as a process for the cultivation of empathy is indebted most notably to the accomplishments of Alice Neel, and now enters a realm of interdisciplinary discourse. As such, my pictures may be "read" as performance, as therapy, as propaganda, and as narratives in or outside of the context of Art History. Further, my work rejects the "male gaze" and suggests a new kind of looking - gayze - which is an act of identification with and eroticization of the bodies I paint. Gayze is a reciprocal exchange of power, vulnerability, and permission to look, in which men paint men as both desirous and desiring. Finally, the paintings are ritualistic, meditative pictures that reinforce the commonly held spiritual idea of connectedness and sameness between all things, echoed in the profoundly creative process of painting.

Portraits of my family and friends in their bedrooms and personal spaces investigate the way we construct our identities in the context of family and community and give physical form to my understanding of these abstract sets of relationships. Such images examine the relationships that constitute a family, suggesting coherence among those photographed. The domestic landscape is an ideal site for autobiographical reflection and can reveal intimate details about those photographed. Color, furniture, and personal objects are symbolic suggestions of a relationship between the individual and their personal space. My portraits capture expressions that concurrently disclose and question characteristics of the human condition. In the context of the series, the photographs closely relate to self-portraiture. Subtle expressions of anxiety or self-consciousness allow for empathetic exchanges between the individuals photographed and the viewer. An emotional experience is revealed. The images communicate varying degrees of intimacy alongside levels of detachment and vulnerability.

Poster exhibited at GPSC Student Showcase, February 24th, 2016, University of Arizona. 2nd Place Winner of the Creativity Undergraduate Award. / Architecture has the power to create an inclusive society where everyone feels as if they have a voice and responsibility to a sustainable future. With collaboration and dedication, architectural design can have a huge impact on the living conditions of underrepresented communities. Working through the Drachman Design Build Coalition, the scope of the project involves designing and constructing an affordable dwelling for a low-income family in the city of Tucson, Arizona. The overall mission of building affordable housing is to provide under-served families with housing opportunities that would not be otherwise. The house will be designed as a 2-3 bedroom dwelling with 2 bathrooms, and indoor living space, outdoor living area, and a carport. Through research and physical observation, potential sites were explored, sustainable strategies were learned, and affordable housing techniques were studied. Many iterations of housing models were developed based on information gained from local books and journals written on traditional southwestern housing designs. The Notch House starts to develop as a sustainable affordable housing project designed in response to underrepresented families in Tucson.

People in all known cultures play games and today digital gaming is an important leisure activity for hundreds of millions of people. At the same time game design has developed into a profession of its own. There are several practical game design guidelines and text books but they rarely manage to connect their findings into relevant areas of research such as psychology and design research. Understanding game design, both as an activity and as an end result of that activity, in a more profound way could alleviate this problem. The main goals of this thesis are to understand in a more profound way how to design games and based on that understanding develop frameworks and methods for aiding game design. By extending knowledge about game design can not only improve the quality of the end-products but also expand the potential design space even in unpredictable ways. Game design contains many sub-areas. Character, story, and environment design are integral parts of the current game development projects. The aim of this thesis, however, is to have a critical and exploratory look at structures of gameplay as design material. Gameplay is the interaction between the game rules, challenges, elements, and players.In one sense gameplay defines the game. The focus of the thesis is mainly analytical, although parts of the results are based on practical research through design activities. The thesis contributes to game research in three interralated ways: (1) An analytical contribution to understanding gameplay was done in the gameplay design patterns work. The patterns are described as an approach to both analyse existing games and aid in designing new games. The patterns describe recurrent gameplay and also analyse these structures from the design material point of view. (2) A theoretical study of basis for gameplay experiences was conducted through review of relevant models and theories in neuroaesthetics, cognitive and social psychology and game research. The framework offered in the thesis explains why certain gameplay structures are more recurrent based on defining gameplay as caricatures of intentional behaviour. (3) The game design patterns approach and research through design projects have contributed to the analysis of game design as an activity and practical guidelines for concrete design work in more specific areas of game design. The goals of this thesis are ambitious and many questions are left unanswered. Using the patterns approach in conjunction with game design and ideation methods is still in its infancy. The concept of gameplay as caricatures of intentional behaviour should be explored further, especially in conjunction with other theories and frameworks relevant for understanding gameplay experience such as user engagement, immersion, and presence. Empirical experiments validating or falsifying this view on gameplay would be valuable as further contributions to game research.

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This thesis builds a knowledge-based, computer-aided decision making shell, written in LISP, for assistance in generic engineering system design problems. The theoretical framework presented in the thesis places system design processes in the environment of multifaceted modelling methodology and artificial intelligence techniques. A new reliable and efficient knowledge representation scheme--FRASES is introduced into the knowledge base design. The scheme combines system entity structure and frame and production rule system, and allows us to easily acquire, represent, and infer knowledge and information about the system being designed. In the design of the inference engine, multiple inference algorithms are supported in the shell. They infer a set of desired system configurations with respect to the designer's objectives and requirements. In comparison, top-down reasoning with depth-first offers the most efficient reasoning algorithm when using the FRASES knowledge representation scheme.

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is a short range radio technology for communication between two objects namely, a reader and a tag. Design of an RFID tag with the best range is always the motive of an RFID designer. In this thesis two RFID tags were simulated, designed and manufactured. The first one is a semi-passive RFID tag, which also serves as a discrete prototype tag for the research group to master RFID tag designs. The user can program and further extend the use of this tag according to the requirements. This RFID tag is provided with JTAG interface to program and debug. The read range of this prototype tag is found to be 1m with reader EIRP of 30dBm. The second design is a passive tag which can be commercialized. It achieves a competitive read range of 2.9m for reader EIRP of 21dBm. The read range when measured in a practical implementation inside a building corridor was 15m.

Dagsljus handlar om en rytm, en förändring under dygnet och under året, en återkommande rörelse. En naturlig rörelse som får oss att må bra och något som vi alla behöver! I mitt projekt utforskar jag samspelet mellan ljus och mörker, rörelse och rytm. Jag vill upptäcka lösningar som ger en större och annorlunda upplevelse än det förväntade. Jag vill tillåta ljuset att få vara den tillgång det faktiskt är. Vad händer med rummet och med oss människor när dagsljuset sätts i centrum? När ljuset och skuggorna tillåts leka med den rumsliga aktiviteten? När gestaltningen får komma inifrån och ut?

The design intent of this thesis is to deconstruct the elements of the beer brewing process to allow the public to engage, enjoy, and appreciate the process while dining. It is to create a site for a craft brewery that is local to the neighborhood of The Fan. Allowing the public to engage, cultivate and create enthusiasm for the brewing process. To deconstruct the industrial process of brewing beer to allow accessibility for the public to enjoy the process while eating, drinking, and learning.

Davida Rochlin said, “Nobody thought much about the front porch when most Americans had them and used them. The great American front porch was just there, open and sociable, an unassigned part of the house that belonged to everyone and no one, a place for family and friends to pass the time.” The landscape in which those porches existed has changed. Our traditional views of housing and neighborhoods (single family homes with a cul-de-sac at the end) really aren’t the norm anymore. In the last 10 years more Americans have moved to, and are living in cities than in the past (Lamber, Lisa 2012). Currently, 80.7% of Americans live in urban areas, up 1.7% from 2000 (Lamber, Lisa 2012). With this migration, there has been a surge in renovated, multi-family housing. While this does solve the problem of allowing more families to move back into urban areas, these buildings often have no sense of community or neighborhood. You don’t have neighbors, you simply live next to people. The porch used to be a symbol of community, a sociable space. Neighbors would sit outside and watch kids play and catch up with each other. But both technology and our own self-imposed isolations have lead us to slowly loose touch with our physical neighbors. The intention of this project is to create a community, a neighborhood, within a single building housing multiple families through porches and their variations.