Thesis Capstone 2026

When telling an "authentic" or "real" story in an exhibition environment, it is the objects – their situations, juxtapositions and curation – that can do the work of capturing and conveying the story with emotion and opportunities for meaning-making. Exhibiting and juxtaposing authentic objects in situ, alongside other artifacts and props or facsimiles rather than alone, invites more opportunity for a more visually comprehensive, memorable, and emotional visitor experience.

When considering the power of contextualized objects to convey notable contemporary events, exhibition creators should look to rapid collecting strategies, juxtaposition and composition of historic artifacts along with mundane contemporary objects, to increase the authenticity of future exhibitions. 

Client: Light Phone

Venue:  The White Box 31 E 17th Street, New York, NY 

Audience: Teens to Young Adults 16-36

Email: [email protected]

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anna-soucy/ 

Thesis Statement: Humor is a powerful tool for coping with the difficulties of life, learning new things, and bridging social divides. Museums have an underexplored opportunity to use humor and comedy in new ways to capture attention, reduce anxiety, and subvert expectations as a means to inspire positive social change and give visitors agency towards action. By translating comedic devices and techniques into space, exhibition designers can enhance their narrative storytelling for a variety of topics, and create meaningful experiences that motivate visitors by facilitating joy, stress relief, and social connection.

Client: Clean Water Action and The STEM Alliance

Venue:  Griffin Museum of Science and Industry

Audience: Teens and Young Adults (Ages 13–25)

Email: [email protected]

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/grace-warnick 

Craft is an intentional form of making that encourages personal expression and creative storytelling. When practiced collectively, it transforms individual creativity into a shared social experience that fosters belonging and togetherness. Through craft-based interactions in experiential environments, exhibition design can create welcoming third places that foster meaningful social connections and help address feelings of isolation among Gen Z in an increasingly digital world.

Client: Etsy and The Center for Craft

Venue: 54 Crosby Street

Audience: Curious Makers (Ages 21-29)

Email: [email protected]

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/iris-yee

Belonging is a human need, yet it is often treated as a privilege, leaving many without it. Experiential design, from museums to brand activations, aims to evoke many emotions in visitors but rarely makes belonging the goal. Belonging has many elements: social ties, psychological safety, cultural recognition, and place, the element this work examines.

Place attachment, the theory that explores the cognitive and behavioral bond between people and meaningful environments, offers designers a way to foster a feeling of belonging within experiential spaces. This thesis argues that when designers design with belonging as the goal and place attachment as the framework, visitors form stronger, more meaningful connections to both the space and the brand. Those connections, in turn, grow into long-term brand loyalty and a desire to return.

Client: New York or Nowhere

Venue: 106 N6th St, Brooklyn, New York

Audience: New Yorkers & NYC Tourists

Email: [email protected]

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jjenny-estevez/

Exhibition Designers have an opportunity to harness the power of positive fantasy engagement. By utilizing elements commonly found in tabletop role-playing games and open-world video games–worldbuilding, role assumption, player agency, and emergent storytelling– designers can create experiences that move beyond passive observation and invite audiences into a shared narrative. 

Rather than functioning solely as entertainment, these experiences can use psychological distance to help audiences feel more comfortable engaging in difficult ideas, exploring personal perspectives, and participating in meaningful social experiences. In this framework, visitors are not simply stepping away from reality for a moment, but returning with new ways of understanding themselves and the world around them. 

Client:  Merriam-Webster Inc. and Linguistic Society of America

Venue:  Traveling Exhibition starting at Memorial Union, University
of Wisconsin-Madison

Audience: College Students and Language Enthusiasts

Email: [email protected]

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/jessica-doan63

Brands are creating environments that fall flat, often dropping their standard 2D graphics into physical spaces rather than creating engaging experiences. Branding should extend beyond the 2D to encompass all senses. Light, color, material, scale, enclosure, orientation, and pacing can shape the atmosphere of a space and create a more emotional experience.

What if atmosphere were treated not as a byproduct of other design decisions, but as a design parameter in itself?

Client:  Scholastic

Venue:  The Current (Pier 59, Chelsea Piers)

Audience: Children (6 - 12) visiting with parents, caregivers, family members,
or school groups. 

Adults who grew up with I SPY and Scholastic.

Email: [email protected]

LInkedIn: [email protected]

Thesis Statement: As the world becomes increasingly unpredictable and overwhelming, visitors often enter museums and exhibit spaces already carrying the stressors of modern life. Applying the framework of magical realism to the exhibition space leverages ordinary experiences that visitors relate to with a layer of disbelief and discovery that allows an experience to be impactful, serve as a space to practice magical thinking, and guide visitors to find deeper meaning in their experiences. By activating a response of surprise and curiosity, designers can create speculative and immersive environments that engage visitors in layered discovery through use of personal narratives and elements that subvert expectations such as illusions, playing between the senses, and moments of wonder. 

Client: Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco and Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation

Venue: San Francisco Ferry Building

Audience: Chinese-American Young Adults (18-39), Families, and First and Second Generation Immigrants

Email: [email protected] 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lydiayylee/

When normal human experiences are stigmatized, silence turns natural processes into sources of shame that persist across generations. For instance, stigma surrounding menstruation hinders critical conversations between caretaker and child, limiting understanding and creating social isolation during puberty. Experience design can aid this developmental transition by transporting visitors to a world with social norms different from their own: changing unfamiliar concepts into shared experiences. Allegorical storytelling and playful learning provide accessible frameworks for difficult conversations, supporting families as they navigate puberty with more knowledge, confidence, and mutual understanding.

Client: Scarlet by RedDrop

Venue: Global School Brooklyn (Crown Heights)

Audience: Children (ages 7-11) and Caretakers

Email: [email protected]

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marina-latto/

Thesis Statement: Modern life is increasingly fast, commercial, and screen-driven, and many people feel mentally drained and disconnected as a result. Exhibition and experience design can respond as a form of care, by creating emotional infrastructure: environments deliberately shaped to help address human emotional needs. The specific pressures of modern life will keep changing in form, but the human need for refuge, restoration, and meaning will not. This thesis therefore proposes a framework of conditions for care that designers can use to create environments that act as antidotes to overstimulated culture, from now to the future. 

Client: Aesop

Venue: Brooklyn Museum’s Beaux Arts Court

Audience: Digital Natives (Age 18-35)

Email: [email protected]

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maya-marzuki-peters

At the advent of the digital age, programmers and designers aimed to minimize user friction in an effort to create digital interactions that were intuitive and easy to use. Decades later, we are in an age of algorithmically-based digital environments that relies on hyperpersonalization and frictionless design in order to remove any and all discomfort that might come up in our online experience - no thinking required. This has resulted in a digital landscape that eats away at our cognitive abilities and our ability to relate to people across differences.

In this study, I will examine the idea of “productive friction” - the idea that learning through struggle results in a deeper and more memorable understanding of the concept. By studying this idea through education studies, video games and movement-based learning, I will show how the museum environment can act as an “anti-algorithmic” space by using productive friction as the engine of exhibit design. By utilizing problem-solving, collaboration and physical movement in exhibit design, we can create engaging experiences that restore capacity for social cohesion and deep focus, thereby undoing some of the harms caused by the frictionless algorithmic environment.

Client: Brooklyn Museum

Venue: Brooklyn Museum

Audience: Audience: Gen Z (Ages 14-29)

Email: [email protected]

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarah-r-2392631b2/

This study explores how employing the subjunctive mood and asking what if questions in exhibitions can help foster mini-c creative growth within visitors. By focusing on mini-c creativity–the creativity found in learning, where experiences and information are new and personally meaningful to the individual–exhibitions can create room for building confidence in the process of discovery. In creating spaces that give visitors permission to imagine, play, and take creative risks without the fear of being wrong, designers can offer the public an understanding that creativity is a lifelong muscle and universal characteristic that belongs to everyone. 

Client: City Lore and Simon’s Foundation Science Sandbox

Venue: The First National City Bank of New York

Audience: Teens and Adults (Ages 14 - 45)

Email: [email protected]

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shreyabpatel/

Thesis Statement: As people age, everyday tasks can become more challenging, increasing the demands on older adults and their caregivers. This thesis looks at how responsive technologies embedded in physical environments can provide personalized assistance and contextual support, easing the burden of caregiving while helping older adults maintain their independence and quality of life. Through exhibition design, the research extends into a narrative about aging; illustrating how technology and community work together to provide the optimum network of care.

Client/Venue: MIT Age Lab, MIT Museum

Audience: Adults 45 -65

Email: [email protected]

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/summer-xiang/

Client: 

Venue: 

Audience: 

Fashion and Music are powerful storytelling devices that communicate cultural reaction to a historical time period's political climate. 

Client/Venue: Underground Atlanta

Audience: OutKast  Audience, Fashion and Music Enthusiasts

Email: [email protected]

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/christina-walker-221733247