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.

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.

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.

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.

A personal, artistic exploration of the nuances of the pictographic characters in written Chinese.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Link to album: https://soundcloud.com/rascal-tunez/sets/lanes

Halide perovskites are promising materials for tandem solar cell applications due to their easily tunable bandgap through cation and halide variations. However, photo-induced halide segregation in iodide-bromide perovskite chemistries often results in iodine-rich and bromine rich domains that limits the efficiency of tandem solar cells. One approach to mitigate such segregations reported in the literature is the addition of chlorine to the usual iodide-bromide perovskite compositions. With Gaussian process regression and other computational tools, we efficiently explore the cesium-formamidinium triple halide perovskite composition space and optimize for perovskite optical property and stability at the same time.

Research Advisor: Rebecca Belisle, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Physics, Wellesley College Research Co-Advisor: Zachary del Rosario, Ph.D., Visiting Professor of Engineering, Olin College of Engineering Academic Advisor: Mark Somerville, Ph.D, Provost, Dean of Faculty, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Physics, Olin College of Engineering

We see a misalignment between the engineering field’s constitutive-interests rooted in the reductionist sciences and the needs of the 21st century in the socio-political, environmental, and spiritual realms. Following Habermas’s critical theory, the knowledge-constitutive interest of the natural and reductionist sciences lie primarily in the manipulation of the physical world for the purpose of predictable and quantifiable outcomes by reducing the studied system to its smallest components. Such interests are unfit to understand and intervene in our world; a living world of dynamic complexity. We argue that a renewed science of holism will create the conditions for a critical engineering education that can mimic the properties of living systems to recreate a thriving existence for all living beings on this planet. In this thesis, we identify six loose web-nodes to draw a picture of a science for the whole:

(1) Natural phenomena such as emergence, self-organization, or autopoiesis acquaint us with the nature of nature. (2) The study of our world brings us closer to our cosmos’s mysteries, which naturally introduces spirituality to the holistic web. (3) Dynamically complex systems theory attempts to understand the relationships between parts of the system to make assumptions about future behavior or opportunities for intervention. Practices that are commensurate with the nature of reality are crucial for an effective engagement with living systems. Such practices include (4) methods for a co-creation of the future and (5) research and learning methodologies that embrace unpredictable emergence of insights and emancipate us from hidden oppressive power structures. (6) Lastly, a holistic science includes the reductionist sciences to analyze, predict, and control non-living, simple systems. Our hope is that a holistic science will re-shape engineers’ understanding to learn and interact with our world to recreate the nature of nature in our systems: a thriving existence for all.

Readers are invited to comment on the online version of the thesis: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1C3SCRvH27EgcddZZr0pTxEqCUb41ksqJ/view

| Advisors: Linda Vanasupa, Benjamin Linder, Jonathan Stolk

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.

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.

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.

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.

Electromyography can be used as a human machine interface in which a person could control a computer or device with the electrical signals that cause muscle movement. This research used EMG data from the SEEDS data base to explore what features should be used by machine learning algorithms to accurately classify EMG data into which motion a subject is preforming. We extracted features from the EMG data and then ran three different feature selection algorithms to find which features were the most useful in classification. In the end, we found eight features that our various selection algorithms selected the most and concluded that those features would be good starting place when trying to classify EMG data.

The discussion of inclusivity and accessibility is often something that happens in a closed system, where able bodied people discuss how to make things easier for people who have a disability. When written out on paper, it seems silly, like not inviting someone to their own party, but in reality it happens constantly. In order to most effectively meet the needs of people with all abilities it is necessary to include them at the discussion and to recognize their ideas and solutions as more valid than those created by people who do not actively live with the disability they may be designing for. When teams, companies and projects fail to include people with disabilities in the create of solutions that will supposedly make their lives easier, not only does society lose the possible contributions of an entire community of people, but the solutions that are created are often not the most direct way to solve the problem. Inclusivity means not just including the ideas and words of people with disabilities but also recognizing the contributions of disabled designers and engineers themselves. During the summer of 2015, I worked on a research team led by Sara Hendren, with two other students from Olin College, Toni Saylor and William Lu. The research team worked on multiple projects in the accessibility and inclusivity design space, including conducting background research for a book proposal that Professor Hendren was starting and working to document and share the work done by a woman named Cindy, who had created a variety of innovative solutions to modify her environment to suit her needs as a person with multiple disabilities.

Prior research has shown piezoelectric vibration sensors can detect sail luffing, the acceleration of a flexible sail out of its normal wing state caused by a momentary reversal of the air pressure gradient over the sail. Luffing decreases boat performance by reducing the lift generated by the sail. Yet detecting sail luffing in flexible sails for robotic sailboats is still challenging. This paper presents three methods of sensing characteristics of a luff – air pressure differential which causes the luff, the acceleration of the sail as the luff occurs, and the influence of motion and acceleration of a luffing sail on members placed on the sail. We assess three different sensor types based on cost, ease of use, complexity of electrical interface, power consumption, accuracy of the sensor and amount of noise in sensor readings. To classify the most effective sensor for a given set of constraints, a multifaceted analysis has been performed with a piezoelectric vibration sensor, an acceleration sensor, and a gas pressure sensor. The accuracy and precision of each sensor at sensing sail luffing is evaluated by comparing the sensor output with a plot of the position of a single point on the sail through time generated with computer vision.

In late 2018, the City of Providence began allowing scooter share companies to operate within their city and to provide alternative forms of transportation to their population. These scooter share companies are required to uphold certain distribution requirements within the five geographical regions of the city: downtown, east side, south side, north west, and west. The system has definitely changed over time. From August 2018 to October 2019, Bird and Lime were the primary scooter providers to the city. They were later replaced by Spin and Veoride. In general, all providers increased their scooter deployments over time and saw an increase ridership as a result. It is clear, however, that each provider expanded their services to meet the needs of each region quite differently. This is evident in how fleet size differs across each region over time. In this paper, we discuss our study of the equity of access to scooter share services in Providence. We work with the City to investigate how ridership, coverage, and service vary across the region to identify underserved communities. Further, we analyze sociodemographic factors from 2018 census data to put these patterns into context.

Aquaculture has the potential to become the world's most important and sustainable option for protein production, but many of those involved in the industry currently lack the tools, resources, and education to make that happen. The purpose of this paper is to explore the feasibility of creating a robust but low-cost fluorometer that can detect chlorophyll levels and provide offshore aquaculture operations with immediate feedback on how their day-to-day operations impact the nutrient levels in the surrounding waters. The experimental setup involves an LED that emits light at 430 nm, focusing optics, and a photodiode placed perpendicular to the LED that is capable of detecting any light emitted from an algae sample. Preliminary results are promising as they demonstrate that such a setup is sensitive enough to detect the difference between samples containing different concentrations of chlorophyll. Further testing is required to optimize the fluorometer, and more research needs to be done into how to package the sensor and make it suitable for in situ trials.

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!

Cerebral palsy patients currently face a significant treatment gap, which in part has to do with the high cost of traditional treatment methods. Research has shown that cerebral palsy affects 1 in 323 children in the United States (CDC, 2018), 42% of which aren’t receiving the care that they need. The medical expenses needed for children with cerebral palsy are 16 times higher than other children, which could account for this high percentage. The summer research team aims to look into and develop low-cost technology alternatives that could supplement these children’s physical therapy from home. Building upon existing work on controllable gloves with fabric actuators, my peer researchers and I looked into efficient design changes that accomplish our goal (Polygerinos, 2013).

Based on a review of research papers, existing strategies for glove position control (Yap, Kamaldin, Kim, Nasrallah, Goh, Yeow, 2015), were paired with sensors that could be integrated into a low-cost version. Two different sensor types were chosen to be evaluated for their feasibility for our project: a commercially available glove controller based on a conductive-ink bend sensor, and a novel conductive textile. Analysis of the data demonstrated that the glove controller sensors worked well, better than the conductive textiles, as expected. The results indicate that the glove sensors worked best when bending them along a radius rather than at a joint since the signal is strongest when the sensors are bent consistently along the length rather than at a single point. Further research is needed to characterize the accuracy of the sensors, but they are ready to be integrated and tested with the other control aspects.