Media Design Practices







THESIS LIVE 2026
THURSDAY, APRIL 9 @ 3PM PT


Thesis Year Students in Media Design Practices present their thesis projects with guest respondents.
Join us for an afternoon of elective personalities, chatty robotic gardeners, tomb scrolling, annals of ephemera, ai dreamcatchers, accretional drawing, ambient companions, mood compression, astrological Zugzwang, uncontrolled controllers, neo-WYSIWYG, fugitive originals, globe spanning repasts of infinite care, fog machine learning, audience orchestration, knotty neighbors, neolithic acoustics, waiting wombs, tender systems, infinite ledes…

Hosted by MDP Lead Thesis Advisors: Elise Co, Sean Donahue, Tim Durfee

Guest Respondents: Yasaman Sheri, Principal Investigator at Serpentine Synthetic Ecologies Lab, Adjunct Faculty at ArtCenter College of Design, and, Mike Milley, Principal Futurist at The New Next, Instructor at Stanford University, Adjunct Faculty at ArtCenter College of Design


2026 GRADUATES




ADAM ZHENGYUAN XU
Song(Silly)

Song(Silly) is an experimental system of musical notation that reimagines the score as a living archive of musical performances. Here, musical work is presented as a lineage of deviations and iterations produced from repeated co-authorship experiences between the response of the audience and the performance of the musician.

AURORA LI
Poppipet: Ambient Companionship

Poppipet is an ambient AI companion that transcends traditional characters. Using abstract shape and motion, it imprints on your life—quietly observing and evolving. It prioritizes presence over interaction, offering subtle nudges only when your habits feel "off." It is an organic, abstract mirror of your shared growth and journey. 



BLUE ROBERTS (He/Him)
Intuitive Mediamaking—Exploring Virtual Production Methods

The goal: adapt alternative methods of virtual production, explore the ways sensory feedback can enhance creative making processes, and document the connection between these topics. This research explored the ways virtual production and prioritizing creative intuition could affect a film production’s outcome by testing the methods through a short film.

EILEEN JINGXIN XU
The Knotting Lounge

In cities optimized for relentless speed, The Knotting Lounge proposes an alternative emotional infrastructure. Through the tactile, soothing act of tying knots, participants embrace slowness. A shared NFC chip bridges this physical labor into a collective digital archive, co-creating "Architextiles"—a soft, living monument to human vulnerability and care.



ETHAN SIJUN HUANG
Connection to the Absent

The Specter Display Tombstone establishes a mediated connection between the living and the dead. Rather than enabling direct communication, it reveals mediation itself as a form of connection—an experience of presence through absence.

HARRY XINGSHENG WU
Artificial Atmosphere

Artificial Atmosphere explores how generative AI reconstructs weather as mood, texture, and visual pattern rather than physical force, and how staged footage, AI transformation, and atmospheric experimentation are used to construct artificial sensory experiences that reshape image, space, and plausibility in moving images.



HOLLY ZIRU ZHAO
Tender Systems

The project Tender Systems explores how everyday technology might be reframed through slowness, care, and mindful attention. By creating systems that connect weaving, plant care, and electronics, the project examines how interaction design can support alternative priorities of function, ones centered on nurturing, maintenance, and duration rather than efficiency, immediacy, and optimization.

JAEHYUN KIM
Dreamin’ Camo

Fantasies are from both lived and unlived experiences, so they are personal. However, since fantasies are inexplicable, we feel hesitant to express it but since fantasies are personal motivations, we also want to feel close to us. How can we feel fantasies close and keep them private even in the real world?



JANE JIANHAN LU
Against the Oracle

Play a game of chess and I’ll tell you your fortune. This thesis examines structured play as a forecasting system, where prediction becomes the act of reading patterns and navigating probability. By exposing computation as interpretation, it reframes predictive systems as tools that reorganize the past to guide present decisions under uncertainty.

JIWON JANG
Al for Memory

What if Al could turn our photos and messages into sources of joy and comfort? We constantly create memories but rarely revisit them. These forgotten data still archive our daily lives and emotions. This project explores how Al can resurface and transform them into meaningful experiences that bring delight, encouragement, and emotional connection.



KERWIN YI DING
The Posthuman Garden

Posthuman Garden is an interactive installation exploring identity as a relational condition shaped by environment, non-human agents, and technology mediation. Through a chain of interactions between human and machine, the work reveals how perception, behavior, and meaning continuously emerge within a dynamic, posthuman field.

LEXIE YUETONG LIU (She/Her)
The Shape of Remembering

The Shape of Remembering is an interactive installation exploring the difference between human and machine memory. Through drawers, sensory triggers, and a projected interface, it shows memory as fragile, embodied, and emotional rather than searchable data. The project asks what is lost when remembering is increasingly outsourced to digital systems.




LIXIAN MARSHALL ZHAO
Sparkscroll

Sparkscroll is an app built on top of existing media platforms to transform passive short-video consumption into an active, 3D knowledge architecture. By prompting users to reflect while watching, it uses AI to distill insights into a personalized "knowledge galaxy." This helps users uncover their unique thinking patterns and function as a powerful visual engine for deep self-reflection and future brainstorming at the same time.

NINA SUBING KAN
The Shape of Memory

Human memory rarely preserves the world as a perfect image. Instead, it holds fragments—objects, atmospheres, and impressions that shift over time. This project explores an AI system that translates environments into language and regenerates them as images, revealing how perception, memory, and meaning drift across media.




SHIRLEY PIOTROWSKI
Playdate

Playdate is an interactive audio-visual system that explores unstructured play as an alternative to productivity-driven technology. Through tactile interfaces, evolving sound, and immersive visuals, users engage in open-ended experimentation. The project invites curiosity, presence, and exploration, reframing play as a meaningful way to engage with creativity, technology, and experience.

YIQI ZHANG
(G)roove

Beneath the threshold of hearing, vibrations move through matter, leaving traces that often go unnoticed. Using clay as a medium, environmental sound is transformed into tactile forms and interactive systems, reimagining sonic memory as something material, embodied, and perceptible beyond listening.



YUDI ZHANG (She/Her)
The Changing Room: Rethinking Self-Protection and
Micro-Scale Attachment in Urban Non-Places

The Changing Room explores self-protection behaviors in urban non-places: airports, malls, transit stations, where defensive spatial design conditions psychological regression and disconnection. Drawing on Winnicott's transitional objects and Augé's non-place theory, this project proposes a body-scale spatial installation that abstracts the emotional qualities of handmade objects: softness, low stimulation, responsive contact, to offer micro-scale attachment within standardized urban environments.

ZHUO WANG
Recoil

Recoil translates photos into prompts and regenerates memories to explore why AI conversations feel meaningful. It reveals that the sense of being understood comes not from AI, but from projection, imitation, and association. Through interaction, users witness how they reconstruct meaning and repeatedly encounter themselves.



ZIBO CHEN
Soft Authority AI Operating System

Soft Authority imagines a future where AI operates as a perceptual layer over reality. Through immersive, embodied agents, the project explores new forms of interaction and behavior design, examining how AI can interpret, respond to, and coexist with human perception.

ZITA ZITONG WANG
Mother Tongue: An Edible Memoir

Testing edibility through weaving: orange peels, pasta, remnants. What can food hold beyond nourishment? My mother sends recipes from China—measurements that resist translation, care that manifests as control. Fortune cookies, unknown to her, transform transmission. Three stations. Hidden words. The question isn't whether it's perfect.

GUEST RESPONDENTS



Yasaman Sheri
Yasaman Sheri is a designer, writer, and researcher at the intersection of science, technology, and society. Her work specializes in machine and biological sensing and explores new forms of perception enabled by advanced technologies, interrogating their cultural, ecological, and social implications. Sheri brings over 15 years of experience in design leadership of novel computing interactions & machine sensing from industry working with Microsoft HoloLens, Google X, and Meta Hardware. She is Principal Investigator and founder of Synthetic Ecologies Lab at Serpentine R&D. Mike Milley 
Mike Milley is a futurist who has led teams answering the question "What's next?" at some of the world’s most innovative brands—including Nike, Samsung, BMW, and Mercedes-Benz. His practice explores the intersections of society, technology, and culture, using foresight as a catalyst for creative transformation. He was educated at Columbia University and Parsons School of Design. 

Thesis is a two-term culminating project for every graduating student in MDP. This personal project is where students take interdisciplinary methods and actively define new design opportunities / territories through research and engagement with diverse social, cultural and technological contexts. Students synthesize their work through a series of classes, committee advisement meetings (one-on-one and group), lectures, presentations and reviews.

Thesis Core Faculty
Elise Co (Lead Advisor)
Sam Creely
Sean Donahue (Lead Advisor)
Tim Durfee (Lead Advisor)
Mashinka Hakopian

Advisors & Guest Critics
Erika Barbosa
Justine Esquivel
Ben Hooker
Umi Hsu
Claire Kwon
Christina Valentine
Lavinia Lascaris
Todd Masilko
Mike Milley
Mehar Nangia
Mark Parsons
Jennifer Rider
Jenny Rodenhouse
Julian Scaff
Yasaman Sheri
Jonathan Turner

Coordination
Lindy Leong
Ana Marquez

Website
Una Cai
Jiaying Su