The Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences (AHS) Capstone is a semester-long project that builds upon prior coursework and allows students to produce a polished piece of original work. Past projects have included papers suitable for publication, art installations, computer games, and more. This collection contains final AHS work in a variety of mediums, for projects from 2006 to the present.
As a college student, I have spent many hours with my friends discussing the high costs of attending college. The average tuition fees for full time students in US is the second highest in the world, only slightly behind UK1. These high costs made me curious to investigate how effectively the education system functions for educating the people living in the US and creating quality human capital. The money and time put into higher education is also in investment; each investment comes with its own risks and returns. I probed deeper into these topics to understand the whole system of higher education in the US and its effectiveness. By reading the following three part article with titles: 1. Costs of College in the US 2. College: A Good Investment? 3. Improving Higher Education in the US I hope that parents and students hoping to attend college can understand the system better and choose higher education options that best fit their goals.
Written exploration of identity formation through analysis of scenes from the 2017 movie Wonder Woman and retrospection on interpretations to better understand self-identity.
This project was a look into surrealist literature. One goal was to understand how to both generate and understand surrealist fiction. The second goal was to improve as analytical writers by using various methods to examine text
Most modern games treat gameplay and stories as distinct and opposing forces. They feature primarily linear narratives that fail to change substantially in response to player interaction. Frustrated with this restrictive approach to interaction and storytelling, I spent a semester exploring alternate game designs. My research culminated in an online interactive game design document for a unique game without the shortcomings in these games. Time Mansion: Take Back the Future is a concept for a pointandclick puzzle adventure game that allows players to influence a dynamic story inspired by Agatha Christie mystery fiction. Players travel back in time to influence the interactions between computercontrolled characters.
I went into this with a plan, and came out of it without one. What I wanted to do was give a glimpse into what the city of Boston— and some of the surrounding neighborhoods—looked like to the detached eye. These photos are vignettes of a sort, in that they capture a real moment of a real story in time. Take a look, and try to figure out the place, time, or story in the photos. They may not be perfect, complete, or beautiful, but they are alive. These photos were purposely unlabeled and untitled within the show so that the viewer is forced to think more about what and where they represent and come from. In doing this, details become more pronounced and important. I want people to be inside the scene, rather than be outside looking in. I hope you enjoy the show!
An open-ended journey to understand how cities are formed through the forces of urban design and daily life. Work includes digital sketching, animation and image collage.
This paper discusses some of the fundamental approaches to environmental ethics. In particular it discusses some of the differences between anthropocentrism and ecocentrism and some of the advantages of each approach. In addition, it details some of the environmental perspectives of students at Olin.
For my AHS Capstone Project I was working in the scholarly field of painting. I enjoy painting as an art and I want to get better at it. I found after taking a painting course that I especially enjoyed painting landscapes. I also have found that when I’m at college there are places, especially from home, that I miss and have a deep emotional connection with. These are usually the most fun and enjoyable paintings to work on. With this project I am hoping to further develop my skills as an artist while having a fun and relaxing activity during this semester. Going into the project my plan was to go through the photographs that I had from home and my recent road trip across the country and select a handful of photos that I would be interested in painting. Then I went on to explore composition with sketches and draft paints. When I settled on two drafts I was happy with I started my final. My final paintings were inspired by places in Hawaii and Yellowstone National Park.
The most significant part of my experience at Olin has been the people I have met and the friendships I have made. I wanted to do an AHS Capstone project that really represented the importance that these people have had in the past four years of my life. Doing this project with embroidery offers a unique way to accomplish this. The process of creating each portrait gave me time to focus on each subject; while creating the portraits, I can think about each subject as a person and about my relationship to each of them. I created a series of 10 embroidered portraits and an artist’s statement about the project. At the end of the semester, all of the portraits were displayed together in Milas Hall and at Expo before being sent off to each subject.
Artist Origin
I’m Rascal a rapper and producer from Nashville Tennessee living in Massachusetts. I’ve loved hip hop music since I was five years old listening to Black Eyed Peas’ album Elephunk. I was never was too plugged into mainstream hip hop growing up but listened to groups like Blue Scholars and Doomtree. Their work influences how I make and interact with music today. Blue Scholars’ music has a deep focus on staying informed and being policy engage. Doomtree As a group focuses on challenging ideas of society with socialism and anarchy.
Artist Statement
I want to make music to express how I feel about life and how I feel about society. I want to celebrate the highs and lows of life and express vulnerability as a strength. I want to stand up to the structure in society that forces us to be something we are not.
Album Summary
This is my first Album focusing on my upbringing and who I am now. It’s a retrospective of where life has taken me. This album’s main message is that Rascal lived life from moment to moment holding onto whatever he could. To the end of the album to ideal changes to see what he can get out of life.
This collection of stories was created for my arts, humanities, and social science capstone at Olin College of Engineering. The goal of my project was to explore the relationship between fiction and my reality in pieces that intentionally blur the lines between the two. I hoped to use these pieces to share stark glimpses into both my life and my characters’ lives, and leave it to the reader’s interpretation to untangle and decipher these stories as they see fit. I was inspired by semi autobiographical storytelling, such as the Little House on the Prairie series, the book To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, the webtoon The Kiss Bet by Ingrid Ochoa, and Taylor Swift’s recent album folklore. I was also inspired by how works set in realms that feel so distant from us, like The Hunger Games trilogy, can be so rooted and inspired by the actual current social situations and events.
The first three sources all played with retelling their experiences while blending in fictitious or exaggerated components and characters. Little House on the Prairie
presents itself as the closest to the “truth”, but still reveals bits about the author’s life in addition to weaving a fictional narrative. While The Kiss Bet presents itself as fiction, the author has admitted that those close to her can immediately name the individuals and situations that inspired characters and plotlines. Taylor Swift’s folklore was a massive inspiration in regards to the structure and creating a myriad of pieces, as the album contains songs completely about Swift’s life, songs completely about fictional
characters, and songs that combine the two seamlessly. I grew up believing that storytelling was the most compelling and versatile tool in the world. In these pieces, you will read about the plight of an aging nymph, someone who recognizes their role in their own stagnation, and the stories that can be mapped onto one’s hands. But you will also read the confessions of a twenty two year old who is still searching for connection and a sense of belonging.
I grew up with stories about the end of the world heavy on my mind, and that fear still has some hold on me. The 2000’s were the era of the post-apocalyptic dystopia for children’s literature, and I loved the genre. I like to make things, understand how they work, and thinking about the tools and other objects in these stories of survival in the wake of societal destruction have always fascinated me. As a child I learned to sew, knit, weave, and spin yarn among other artistic pursuits. I also started to worry about the world around me. About what would happen if we couldn’t go to the grocery store, if there were no more stores.
The end goal is to produce 3 ceramic busts of figures that are significant in history and also meaningful to the artist (me, Emily Nasiff). Each bust will require researching each individual that will be modeled. Visual research and biography research will be done in order to capture their likeness and a sense of who they were/are beyond just the physical. The overarching goal and educational goal of the project is to build upon previous ceramics skills developed in a previous ISRG around ceramic hand building. This project will focus on strengthening modeling skills. Research will have to be done into best bust making practices.
Due to the current Pandemic and since the busts will be made in Arizona the audience for the physical busts will be rather small. The digital audience will be larger and consist of mainly peers and those at Olin College. The audience the busts will geared toward will be those in Generation Z since these individuals are the one I most hope to impact. The intended impact of this project is to highlight individuals who can bring hope and inspiration to people during this difficult time in history. The audience should walk away reminded that if we are determined and lead with love we can make a difference. Personally, this project will help me use my hands to express how I feel about the future and keep me hopeful.
Creative writing booklet centered around the theme of breaking through the shields we put up and the bubbles enclosing us. The booklet contains three writing pieces, and each piece is matched with a writing prompt, included at the end of the story, and some related recipes. The recipes either involve a food item that is depicted within the story or are closely related in another aspect.
Effective communication is crucial for effective leadership, which is particularly relevant today. Recent events illustrate countless examples of cases where the same data or set of events are covered by different media stations, and although the underlying facts are the same, different news outlets are able to portray a wide array of very contrasting interpretations of what actually happened. In some cases, this is done intentionally to encourage viewers to adopt a particular viewpoint, but in other cases this naturally occurs due to bias of the writers.
Most effective leaders are able to present facts in such a way to compel their audience to feel a certain way or believe a certain narrative, and a disconnect in understanding between the leader and their audience is often undesirable and avoided at all costs. Within engineering, it is often the case that this difference in understanding stems from a miscommunication of technical material to a nontechnical audience, which is something we need to be particularly cognizant of as engineering students hoping to make a positive impact in the world. As someone who is planning on pursuing a research- oriented career path, I believe that it’s far too common for researchers to be incredibly meticulous when it comes to carefully analyzing their data, but then not take the time to fully share the story of why their results matter in the greater context of the world, especially to those outside their field. As an example, there are lots of graphs that attempt to convince the general public that climate change is an issue, but many of them are displayed in a plain graph that doesn’t really communicate the severity of this issue, despite technically presenting the data. Although he presented the same data, cartoonist Randall Munroe is able to clearly communicate the fuller story through this comic (https://xkcd.com/1732/), which tells a story that many of the technical graphs widely circulated online miss.
Through this project, my primary goal is as follows: to learn and practice techniques to share compelling stories with data. To this end, I plan to start with textbook examples, then work my way into “real- world” examples using media I come across. I chose to go with a Miro board since it enables both asynchronous discussion through post- its and synchronous conversations over zoom. I anticipate that these discussions will be informative for everyone involved - after these discussions, I hope that my peers take away insights related to data communication that they incorporate into their future work, and I hope that these discussions help me to see which parts of my work were effective in communicating a story and which parts were confusing for my audience.
I began this project in search of different ways I could capture the world around me as it stands the test of time. As I am nearing a very monumental transition in my life, I can't help but think, "Where has the time gone?"
Time is a fascinating concept, it is constantly change, yet always consistent. Our lives are made up of infinite little moments through which we experience the world. There are times when I wish it would slow down while in others, all I can think about is its passing. I made the decision a few years ago to focus on living in the moment, learning from the past, and aspiring for the future.
This state of mind seeps into my interest in photography as it is a medium that acts as a remote controller with just the pause functionality. We can't stop time, but photographs can preserve an instance albeit in a way that is different than the lived experience.
When I look through the view finder, I am reminded that I represent just one perspective out of a sea of millions. The motivation from this project comes from an interest in slowing down and using photography as a medium to communicate the lens through which I am experiencing my surroundings.
Art + The Internet is the culminating experience of my visual art AHS Capstone. It’s a selection of art works that follow three themes about the experience of living on the Internet: early hopes and Internet Dreams, constructing and performing our Digital Bodies, and contemporary takes on Speculative Futures for our online lives. Together these works explore the Internet’s rapid and pervasive rise as a dominant force in many of our lives and how it inextricably shapes the way we view ourselves and each other. Instead of pulling web-hosted pieces that we would traditionally think of as “Internet art,” I was more interested in curating largely analog art works that address the Internet thematically, rather than interact with it directly. My hope is that this prompts questions about the ways the Internet’s influence bleeds into our physical lives - the World Wide Web is no longer something we can choose to log on or off of, there is no way to fully ‘unplug’ from cyberspace. We are all machine-augmented beings in some form, and the art in this exhibit showcases our cyborg transformation over the last several decades.
The final finished short form writing pieces for my AHS capstone. There is a sci-fi short story, a fantasy short story, and a poetry zine (in pictures and text only form). My goal was to explore a wide variety of short form writing. There is also a 'story builder' guide that was used for an interactive activity during the exhibit.
More about my initial goals and form:
I aimed to write multiple pieces of short form writing (fiction stories & poetry), specifically to explore genre blending and unusual forms of writing. I’m inspired by writers who have transitioned narrators in the middle of paragraphs, have poetic descriptions with cadence in the middle of science fiction, and other unique forms. I want to take time to explore having a personal writing style/trademark while feeling more comfortable in the writing basics.
I produced a portfolio of various stories and poems I wrote during the semester. I also listed the works I was inspired by at the end of each piece. I was successful in my goal to create 8 short form writing pieces for the semester, as I wrote 2 short stories and 9 poems. This was not for my final submission, but I additionally wrote at least something every day in a physical notebook - poetry, thoughts on what I’m reading, or story ideas. This inspired my writing and served as a free brainstorming space. Since I was more comfortable with poems, I wanted to share these in a coherent theme and I compiled them into a zine. This was combined with matching pictures drawn by another student (Dylan Merzenich). The short stories I wanted to be more exploratory and aimed to get more breadth in topic and style. A stretch goal was to make a guide for how to create short stories or generate ideas, which I ended up completing as an interactive activity for exhibit.
Arwen Sadler's AHS capstone project. An exploration of writer's block through multi-media, consisting of post-its and other partially finished writing projects.
For my AHS Capstone project I made video diaries reflecting on my life as a half-Japanese and half-American person. This video (with parts in both English and Japanese) is a compilation of those diaries, and there is an accompanying transcript.
Medium: Hand drawn comic with ink and paper
A comic based off of a small success when dealing with intrusive thoughts fueled by anxiety and depression.
I researched the etymology of the word engineer and the social implications of that. I wrote three insights from this, and made a visual timeline/collage that provides the context.
here are so many things in our daily lives that we see from the same perspective. We are used
to looking at the world from human height, at human scale, and on human timescales. This is no
coincidence, as most things we interact with are designed for exactly this experience. However, if
we take a step back and think about how limited this view is we can start to recognize things that
happen around us constantly yet are completely beyond our normal perspective.
In his exhibit we present a few examples of what we can learn with a shift in perspective and
how the things we take for granted in everyday life can be seen if we take the time to look. We
encourage you to touch, play with, and learn from these exhibits and to ask yourself questions
as you go. See if you can think about a memory you have about a space and imagine it from a
different perspective. Is there a time when you saw something that was right before you the whole
time? What other things do we take for granted when we experience the world?
The reflection game created by Regan Mah in the AHS Capstone class of Spring 2023. A set of prompts that allow players to reflect upon various life experiences.
For my AHS Capstone, I wanted to create a new fantasy world and explore some family and societal dynamics. I wanted to do it through something other than exposition, so I created a character, Ishya, a 25-year-old traveller, to explore the setting.
For my AHS Capstone I decided to contextualize how Dante's Divine Comedy, and in particular Dante's Inferno, influenced different parts of society: such as the Italian Language, the views on the Afterlife, and different forms of classical and modern media.
The project focused on creating accessible video game designs for individuals who experience limitations in their physical movements. Through research on requirements and existing approaches, this project aims to provide enjoyable gaming designs that are inclusive and accessible to all players, regardless of their physical abilities.
This article is the final version of my 2023 AHS Capstone work. It is a 10 page paper about the ethics of robots especially the ones that are used in the workforce.
For my AHS Capstone, I wrote a paper on policy changes that would be necessary in order to promote satellite servicing in space and help promote a more sustainable space environment. This infographic summarizes the technology and policies in the satellite servicing field.
I explored many different ceramic techniques including slab-building, coil-building, and wheel throwing. For my final exhibition, I wanted to continue on with a previous final project that I had for Tell the Story that was centered around integrating Asian snack designs into everyday objects.