CURRENTLY ON VIEW
RISD BFA Graphic Design thesis
2024
(Multimedia)
This thesis is centered on critiquing design in the age of hyper-legibility and noise with a question “What is perfect design?” My intentions are cloaked under the third person fiction story Tower of Babylon written by Ted Chiang about this protagonist Hillalum who tries to go up the biblical tower to reach heaven (in a flat-earth setting of course). Yet, the final plot twist is that whenever people of this world reach heaven, they’re back at ground level again—revealing a world that folds into itself like a cylindrical seal. In lamenting Hillalum’s journey, it is drawn in analogy to the designer’s journey to tell the full story or present the perfect design—our version of heaven.
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This thesis contains 5 books
that will tell the story 5 times. It goes from the 1st book that retells the story in Hillalum’s first person perspective with everything materialized such as sprinkling the spread with soil as he walks past a grass field or brand the construction company to the 5th book where there will be only one page of content that allows the audience to tap their phone to access a website to complete the book by scrolling to randomize all the pages of contents from the previous 4 book. All 5 books look identical from the outside (pages are left empty whenever content shrinks) to make obvious the process of design—and to see information never being lost in any of the books but simply asks the audience to look for them and engage with critical imagination. In James Goggin’s words from the interview, “generous ambiguity.”
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This thesis is centered on critiquing design in the age of hyper-legibility and noise with a question “What is perfect design?” My intentions are cloaked under the third person fiction story Tower of Babylon written by Ted Chiang about this protagonist Hillalum who tries to go up the biblical tower to reach heaven (in a flat-earth setting of course). Yet, the final plot twist is that whenever people of this world reach heaven, they’re back at ground level again—revealing a world that folds into itself like a cylindrical seal. In lamenting Hillalum’s journey, it is drawn in analogy to the designer’s journey to tell the full story or present the perfect design—our version of heaven.
![]()
This thesis contains 5 books
that will tell the story 5 times. It goes from the 1st book that retells the story in Hillalum’s first person perspective with everything materialized such as sprinkling the spread with soil as he walks past a grass field or brand the construction company to the 5th book where there will be only one page of content that allows the audience to tap their phone to access a website to complete the book by scrolling to randomize all the pages of contents from the previous 4 book. All 5 books look identical from the outside (pages are left empty whenever content shrinks) to make obvious the process of design—and to see information never being lost in any of the books but simply asks the audience to look for them and engage with critical imagination. In James Goggin’s words from the interview, “generous ambiguity.”
![]()
that will tell the story 5 times. It goes from the 1st book that retells the story in Hillalum’s first person perspective with everything materialized such as sprinkling the spread with soil as he walks past a grass field or brand the construction company to the 5th book where there will be only one page of content that allows the audience to tap their phone to access a website to complete the book by scrolling to randomize all the pages of contents from the previous 4 book. All 5 books look identical from the outside (pages are left empty whenever content shrinks) to make obvious the process of design—and to see information never being lost in any of the books but simply asks the audience to look for them and engage with critical imagination. In James Goggin’s words from the interview, “generous ambiguity.”
CURRENTLY ON VIEW
RISD Graphic Design BFA Thesis
2024
This thesis is centered on critiquing design in the age of hyper-legibility and noise with a question “What is perfect design?” My intentions are cloaked under the third person fiction story Tower of Babylon written by Ted Chiang about this protagonist Hillalum who tries to go up the biblical tower to reach heaven (in a flat-earth setting of course). Yet, the final plot twist is that whenever people of this world reach heaven, they’re back at ground level again—revealing a world that folds into itself like a cylindrical seal. In lamenting Hillalum’s journey, it is drawn in analogy to the designer’s journey to tell the full story or present the perfect design—our version of heaven.
![]()
This thesis contains 5 books
that will tell the story 5 times. It goes from the 1st book that retells the story in Hillalum’s first person perspective with everything materialized such as sprinkling the spread with soil as he walks past a grass field or brand the construction company to the 5th book where there will be only one page of content that allows the audience to tap their phone to access a website to complete the book by scrolling to randomize all the pages of contents from the previous 4 book. All 5 books look identical from the outside (pages are left empty whenever content shrinks) to make obvious the process of design—and to see information never being lost in any of the books but simply asks the audience to look for them and engage with critical imagination. In James Goggin’s words from the interview, “generous ambiguity.”
![]()
This thesis is centered on critiquing design in the age of hyper-legibility and noise with a question “What is perfect design?” My intentions are cloaked under the third person fiction story Tower of Babylon written by Ted Chiang about this protagonist Hillalum who tries to go up the biblical tower to reach heaven (in a flat-earth setting of course). Yet, the final plot twist is that whenever people of this world reach heaven, they’re back at ground level again—revealing a world that folds into itself like a cylindrical seal. In lamenting Hillalum’s journey, it is drawn in analogy to the designer’s journey to tell the full story or present the perfect design—our version of heaven.
![]()
This thesis contains 5 books
that will tell the story 5 times. It goes from the 1st book that retells the story in Hillalum’s first person perspective with everything materialized such as sprinkling the spread with soil as he walks past a grass field or brand the construction company to the 5th book where there will be only one page of content that allows the audience to tap their phone to access a website to complete the book by scrolling to randomize all the pages of contents from the previous 4 book. All 5 books look identical from the outside (pages are left empty whenever content shrinks) to make obvious the process of design—and to see information never being lost in any of the books but simply asks the audience to look for them and engage with critical imagination. In James Goggin’s words from the interview, “generous ambiguity.”
![]()
that will tell the story 5 times. It goes from the 1st book that retells the story in Hillalum’s first person perspective with everything materialized such as sprinkling the spread with soil as he walks past a grass field or brand the construction company to the 5th book where there will be only one page of content that allows the audience to tap their phone to access a website to complete the book by scrolling to randomize all the pages of contents from the previous 4 book. All 5 books look identical from the outside (pages are left empty whenever content shrinks) to make obvious the process of design—and to see information never being lost in any of the books but simply asks the audience to look for them and engage with critical imagination. In James Goggin’s words from the interview, “generous ambiguity.”
NEWSPRINT GIVEAWAY
Analogous to how the fiction story of reaching heaven juxtaposed to reaching perfect design, the newsprint folds out to the top part fabricated from the fictional world including an interview with the main character while the bottom part is a reveal of the thesis with the interview with a designer in practice (Practise) James Goggin.
