No Place Like

Innovations, ideas, and theories have propelled our society forward, helping make the impossible a reality. Design is the tool that combines sciences, like psychology and math, with creativity to pave the way to new concepts and mediums, such as video games.

Video games are more than just sitting at a computer or couch all day. Today, designers and educators are enhancing how we make decisions with game-based learning (GBL) or gamification. Teachers use gamification to enhance the learning experience and make it more engaging for students.

From Millennials to Gen Z and Gen Alpha, studies have shown that they are both technology-biased and video game-oriented, which is behavior that has continued to rise in recent years. Rather than forcing them to read books they may not be interested in, we as educators must consider the study materials that will best promote their growth and learning. This thesis will explore how gamification can increase student engagement in middle school.

Through design research, experimentation, and the detailing of personal experience, I explore queer loneliness and finding community through design. Loneliness is not just a queer phenomenon; there is also an epi­demic among graphic designers. However, the queer community is more susceptible to loneliness because LGBTQIA+ people are less likely to have relationships that come from the family they grew up with, school friends, or colleagues.

Loneliness negatively affects mental and physical health and can affect overall well-being. People can help their mental and physical health and spark creativity by seeking ways to combat loneliness and building new communities. Finding friends and community as an adult is difficult, but there are many opportunities to build community through design, both online and in-person.

One of my primary interests as a designer is in our subversive identities. We are purveyors of commercialism and artifice when juxtaposed against most other creatives, though we remain indebted to other creative fields in theory and in praxis. In my thesis, I attempt to rectify this dilemma by encouraging the rejection of the commercial as a design work’s totalizing mechanism; the integration of interdisciplinary methodologies to foreground in a design work other value-based rhetorical mechanisms; and finally, the cultivation of practices of Authorship as seen in those disciplines from which design originates.

I capitalize Authorship and Author because I view both as bound by discourse and cultural convention, though transcending disciplines as the privileged practice of a privileged role — a practice and role typically off-limits to the designer. In my essay, I seek to understand the Author-Authorship paradigm from critical perspectives antecedent to design: literary theory and art historical criticism.