The purpose of this thesis was to use color as the primary design element for a place of commerce along the Big Dig (Boston). Color informed the building form and provided the connection for the building type and the urban site. The thesis book unfolds in reverse order, with the intent to reveal the final design at the beginning. As the pages unfold, the evolution of the design emerges to complete with the beginning of the thesis. / Master of Architecture

Yes / In recent years there has been a growing interest in person-centred, ‘living well’ approaches to dementia, often taking the form of important efforts to engage people with dementia in a range of creative, arts-based interventions such as dance, drama, music, art and poetry. Such practices have been advanced as socially inclusive activities that help to affirm personhood and redress the biomedical focus on loss and deficit. However, in emphasizing more traditional forms of creativity associated with the arts, more mundane forms of creativity that emerge in everyday life have been overlooked, specifically as regards how such creativity is used by people living dementia and by their carers and family members as a way of negotiating changes in their everyday lives. In this paper, we propose a critical approach to understanding such forms of creativity in this context, comprised of six dimensions: everyday creativity; power relations; ways to operationalise creativity; sensory and affective experience; difference; and reciprocity. We point towards the potential of these dimensions to contribute to a reframing of debates around creativity and dementia.

The research in this thesis was motivated by an interest in understanding the work and effort that goes into organising family homes, with the aim of informing the design of novel information technology for the home. It was undertaken to address a notable absence of in-depth research into domestic information and communication technology in the fields of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). To that end, this thesis presents an ethnographic study of everyday routines in thirteen family homes. Following an established tradition within HCI and CSCW, the study applies qualitative fieldwork methods as a means to investigate and interpret the empirical materials. Periods of extended observation and semi-structured interviews with the thirteen families over a three-year period form the basis of the empirical material. The materials are analysed using a hybrid perspective composed of a combination of influences from the study of material culture, to interaction analysis and ethnography. The hybrid analytical perspective draws out insights regarding the families’ mundane practices and the artfully devised solutions they use to organise daily life. Four household activities and artefacts are given specific focus: (i) household list making, (ii) the display qualities of refrigerator doors, (iii) the organisation of household clutter, and (iv) the devising of bespoke solutions in organising home life. Broader findings include the observations that people tailor solutions to meet their needs, that optimum efficiency is not the pre-eminent determinant in what method or artefact people choose to organise themselves and their homes, and that homes determine their individual characters in part by how everyday tasks and organisation are accomplished. In short, the personal qualities of these mundane practices are part of what makes a home a home. These findings are used to elicit implications for information technology design, with the aim of encouraging designers of domestic technology to be aware of and respectful towards the idiosyncratic nature of the home, and, wherever possible, to design in such a way as to allow the technology to be appropriated for families’ bespoke tailoring. To evaluate and address this point, two design projects, one on augmented magnets and another on a “media bowl”, are used to develop and test out this approach. Both projects are critically examined to reflect on the efficacy of the design approach and what lessons might be learnt for future studies and design exercises. The combination of detailed ethnographic fieldwork on family homes combined with the development of experimental design projects is intended to deepen the understanding of the mundane behaviours and everyday routines of family homes, in order to better inform the design of information technology for the home.

This critical analysis examines the progression and trajectory of my studio practices over the final two years of my graduate career. The pinnacle of my development became a meditation on time and its overall encompassing effects. The mundane and the fantastic are all bound by time. Many archetypes have ventured to escape the clutches of time. Found objects are remnants of time, linking past to present, present to future. Scars and blemishes are also vestiges of time, marking us like scratches on a record. The detritus of our lives defines our time, as it defines us. This thesis will elaborate on my exploration of time and its implications. It will describe works and identify the evolution of concepts from one work to the next. By defining what the work is and how it operates, the analysis will explore the larger implications of that work.

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This document attempts to capture the main ideas and evolution of my art making process during the three years of graduate studies at the University of New Orleans. My art making practice is an ever-evolving exploration of materials and ideas. Through art processes and experimentations I am able to overcome negative feelings about my role in society. I get lost in my process making things, thinking about things, and trying to come up with new ideas for the world. I am attempting to heighten mundane materials like cardboard, crayons, foams and concrete with intuitive abstract shape making. I am trying to present materials to the viewers in a way that is unusual and engaging. It is my hope that in doing so they might think about similar things that I think about while making the objects.

Among the core concerns with the extraordinary proliferation of land deals in Africa - often referred to as "land grabs" - is that the signing of contracts between host states and foreign companies and/or other states for large swaths of territory and associated agribusinesses could represent an erosion of the host state's sovereignty powers. This concern reveals a double characterisation of the state, as weak in its sovereignty and, yet, as very able to negotiate and implement deals. Host states have been shown to be able to exercise sovereignty in those deals, what type of sovereignty - and whose -, however, remains in dispute. This thesis seeks to address this issue through a case study that focuses on the question how sovereignties are shaping and being shaped by land deals in Mozambique's Limpopo Valley. It specifically investigates the rice and sugar projects in areas of the Chokwe and Xai-Xai regadios. It considers land deals as a set of processes for international-domestic negotiation of goals and funding, followed by processes in the areas of decision-making, policy-making, and project implementation. Based on critical reappraisals of the concept of sovereignty, the thesis understands sovereignty as a set of powers that a state effectively has, beyond mere legal sovereignty, rather than an a priori attribute that a state does or does not possess, in zero-sum terms. As such it is an outcome of relational, inter-subjective processes and, thus, dynamic and historically contingent. Consequently, rather than absolute power over its territory and population, sovereignty is considered in terms of degrees of two types of political power practices, "command" power and "infrastructural" power, according to multiple and not always congruent state functions. To this, the thesis brings a notion of socially constructed state such that it is never neutral because a part of society and, thus socially embedded and produced. This allows me to move past the assumption of 'common good' and the moralist discussions of 'elite capture' and corruption. Based on this theoretical and analytical framework, the thesis posits irrigated agriculture and the state schemes hosting foreign projects as "sites" where actors' interests and powers are shaped relationally: the state (in different capacities), other states and their development agencies, foreign private sector actors and multiple domestic groups. The processes are studied at two levels. The first concerns how state "command" power is used to harness and/or defend against different international developments, negotiating international narratives and domestic needs, resulting in agricultural and water regulations, with ODA dependence for budgets. A subset of regulatory activity is the revisions to by-laws of management irrigation-scheme companies, as new representatives of central power locally. At the second level, the research focuses on interaction with Western equity and Chinese cooperation projects, two of the main types of investors, which come with different foreign management and funding models. Further, processes are embedded in historical trajectories of elite groups' moving away from agriculture since the 1980s, yet holding on to land entitlements, and of producers' displacement. This analytical framework allows research to effectively go beyond the notion of the state as either weak or able, considering it as polymorphous and acting in specific dimensions that no longer seem contradictory. Further, it illuminates the mutually constitutive nature of (sub)national and international dimensions of sovereignty, which tend to be exiled from each other in mainstream approaches to the notion, as well as the inextricability of political and economic powers in the 'sovereignty frontier' of post-conditionality states.

I take inspiration from ordinary objects and materials. Through photography, I attempt to transcend the familiar to discover complexity within the bits and pieces of my everyday life. Like other artistic representations, a photograph is a singular portrayal, not an actualization of physical reality. My artistic exploration of this involves incorporating elements of abstraction to point to the truth that all photographs are, by nature, an abstraction of our physical reality based on perspective. The resulting images often share a quality of impermanence, counterbalanced by the act of making a photographic document. By evoking this temporal quality of photography and abstracting familiar materials and surfaces, I aim to create a playful tension in my imagery.

[Abstract]: The number of so-called ‘half-Japanese’ children (haafu) has been increasing in Japan over the last twenty years, and one place in which such multiethnic people exist in community is in the international school system. Although international schools typically deliver their curricula in English, most multiethnic students are equally familiar with the dominant Japanese culture and language, and can alternate between English and Japanese to accomplish discourse functions and express their hybrid identities. However, little research has been conducted into the bilingual interactional practices that multiethnic Japanese people use to accomplish aspects of their identity in mundane conversation.In conjunction with ethnographic observations and focus group discussions, this study adopts a conversational analytic (CA) approach to investigate some of these interactional practices. Specifically, the investigation draws on video-recorded data of the participants’ speech in naturally occurring conversations to explore the role of codeswitching in co-constructing aspects of identity in interaction with others.The study draws on Membership Categorization Analysis to examine the participants’ use of competency-related category bound activities to index identity in mundane talk, and Conversation Analysis to explore the role of discursive and situated identities in indexing transportable identities like ‘multiethnic Japanese’ in bilingual interaction. The investigation found several bilingual practices that index identity in multi-party talk, including the use of forward-oriented self-repair in bilingual word search sequences and backwards-oriented repair to design a translation in bilingual multi-party talk for a known non-native (or novice) speaker. In combination with embodied practices such as gaze shift, these bilingual practices worked by altering the participant constellation to partition recipients based on their perceived language preference.Throughout the study, mundane talk is seen as a key site in which multiethnic identity is made visible and co-accomplished by the participants.

The humankind uses more of earth’s resources than the planet’s ability to provide renewable resources (WWF 2016). This trend is also contributing to climate changes, which have been a topic on the global political agenda for decades. However, there has yet to be found a sustainable solution. People are becoming impatient of the politicians’ ability to solve the issue and through grassroot movements and activism a range of different approaches have been made to find solutions to climate changes. Social media provides new opportunities to organize large groups of loosely connected people of interest towards a common goal, in this case to take care of the planet. Social media have also developed new forms of political engagement. This thesis is a case study of climate change activism through the zero waste community in Denmark that based on framing theory (Goffman 1974), online observations of local Facebook groups and Instagram activity as well as in-depth interviews pursues to understand in what ways participants use social media to make their everyday climate activism meaningful. In this thesis, Bakardjieva (2009, 2012) concepts of subactivism and mundane citizenship combined with framing theory are used to understand the ways mundane climate change actions are perceived meaningful for the participants in the Danish zero waste community. The study shows examples of how participants of the zero waste community in Denmark use social media in a variety of ways to make their mundane climate activism meaningful for them. They use social media to be inspired, share experiences and feel part of a community that emphasize climate change activism through mundane every day routines. Through online discussions in Facebook groups and on Instagram the participants create, challenge and negotiate a collective action frame of the zero waste movement, which proves useful in motivating and inspiring them to continue to do small acts in their everyday life.