Theses and Dissertations
This collection includes both ASU Theses and Dissertations, submitted by graduate students, and the Barrett, Honors College theses submitted by undergraduate students.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 11
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- Genre: Fiction
- Genre: Interactive multimedia--Design.
Description
Achievement of many long-term goals requires sustained practice over long durations. Examples include goals related to areas of high personal and societal benefit, such as physical fitness, which requires a practice of frequent exercise; self-education, which requires a practice of frequent study; or personal productivity, which requires a practice of performing work. Maintaining these practices can be difficult, because even though obvious benefits come with achieving these goals, an individual's willpower may not always be sufficient to sustain the required effort. This dissertation advocates addressing this problem by designing novel interfaces that provide people with new practices that are fun and enjoyable, thereby reducing the need for users to draw upon willpower when pursuing these long-term goals. To draw volitional usage, these practice-oriented interfaces can integrate key characteristics of existing activities, such as music-making and other hobbies, that are already known to draw voluntary participation over long durations. This dissertation makes several key contributions to provide designers with the necessary tools to create practice-oriented interfaces. First, it consolidates and synthesizes key ideas from fields such as activity theory, self-determination theory, HCI design, and serious leisure. It also provides a new conceptual framework consisting of heuristics for designing systems that draw new users, plus heuristics for making systems that will continue drawing usage from existing users over time. These heuristics serve as a collection of useful ideas to consider when analyzing or designing systems, and this dissertation postulates that if designers build these characteristics into their products, the resulting systems will draw more volitional usage. To demonstrate the framework's usefulness as an analytical tool, it is applied as a set of analytical lenses upon three previously-existing experiential media systems. To demonstrate its usefulness as a design tool, the framework is used as a guide in the development of an experiential media system called pdMusic. This system is installed at public events for user studies, and the study results provide qualitative support for many framework heuristics. Lastly, this dissertation makes recommendations to scholars and designers on potential future ways to examine the topic of volitional usage.
ContributorsWallis, Isaac (Author) / Ingalls, Todd (Thesis advisor) / Coleman, Grisha (Committee member) / Sundaram, Hari (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Stroke is a leading cause of disability with varying effects across stroke survivors necessitating comprehensive approaches to rehabilitation. Interactive neurorehabilitation (INR) systems represent promising technological solutions that can provide an array of sensing, feedback and analysis tools which hold the potential to maximize clinical therapy as well as extend therapy to the home. Currently, there are a variety of approaches to INR design, which coupled with minimal large-scale clinical data, has led to a lack of cohesion in INR design. INR design presents an inherently complex space as these systems have multiple users including stroke survivors, therapists and designers, each with their own user experience needs. This dissertation proposes that comprehensive INR design, which can address this complex user space, requires and benefits from the application of interdisciplinary research that spans motor learning and interactive learning. A methodology for integrated and iterative design approaches to INR task experience, assessment, hardware, software and interactive training protocol design is proposed within the comprehensive example of design and implementation of a mixed reality rehabilitation system for minimally supervised environments. This system was tested with eight stroke survivors who showed promising results in both functional and movement quality improvement. The results of testing the system with stroke survivors as well as observing user experiences will be presented along with suggested improvements to the proposed design methodology. This integrative design methodology is proposed to have benefit for not only comprehensive INR design but also complex interactive system design in general.
ContributorsBaran, Michael (Author) / Rikakis, Thanassis (Thesis advisor) / Olson, Loren (Thesis advisor) / Wolf, Steven L. (Committee member) / Ingalls, Todd (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
This research conceptualizes Gothic literature featuring undead characters produced and popularized by Britain in the early nineteenth century as educational texts. As an influx of new ideas at home and abroad disrupted the lives of the Romantics, not to mention the literal uprising of bodies in the French Revolution and the lost war with the North American colonies, British citizens dedicated themselves to preserving the relative safety of their shores from external and internal threats. I expand the definition of the “undead” to include any tangible, corporeal being once technically dead and now reanimated. In doing so, I invite a broader range of texts, and authors, into the conversation of Gothic literature and the genre’s continued legacy. My work reads male and female authors in dialogue with one another, both sexes working within common networks, rather than as creating separate or disparate traditions. The production of instructive undead bodies becomes particularly important to the development of British national identity and reveals a reliance on the maternal to educate and inform future citizens. The texts examined in this dissertation reveal the necessity of contemplating the histories and experiences of the past, of non-white voices, and of the female influence.
The texts range in publication date from 1805 to 1863 and thus demonstrate the continued used of the undead in the Gothic genre. An examination of the reanimated corpse in Romantic narrative demonstrates how authors utilized the undead as an educational tool both for the characters inside the text and the actual individuals reading the narrative. The undead offers a lens to look at the Gothic not regarding authorial gender or even a character’s gender, but rather in how the genre portrays bodies, and how those bodies interact with and instruct others. This dissertation’s perception of the undead as a powerful educational force in literature assists in the attempt to complete a more comprehensive analysis of Gothic, and therefore Romantic, literature.
ContributorsZarka, Emily (Author) / Lussier, Mark (Thesis advisor) / Looser, Devoney (Committee member) / Broglio, Ron (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
DescriptionThe strips in Mark's Feminist Froze to Default in an Implementation String transfer the lives of feminists absent and imagined, overbearing and empathetic--cross dressers, lethal injectors, expats, planets, and Canadian survivalists--in an autumn to characteristic, unsettle, and reassess controller utterances of masculinity.
ContributorsMcElroy, Alex (Author) / Mcnally, Thomas M (Thesis advisor) / Ball, Sally (Committee member) / Ison, Tara (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
The American culture of capitalism and consumerism is predicated upon the idea that the individuals inside the system are safe. The years since 2001 have seen such finite illusions of isolation and security irrevocably altered and a collective vulnerability rise in the vacuum. Today, with the birth of social media and immediate information, terrorism—as a form of reprehensible protest and a desperate act of war—has gained a new fundamental resource: violence can be broadcast around the world the instant it happens. But with this technological upheaval, a new rogue brand of vigilantism has been born online, and is continually gaining strength as the reach of the Internet snakes further into everyday life, hypothetically altering the notion of individual power and America’s sense of justice, all while potentially placing more innocent lives in harm’s way. And still, amid the uncharted and ever violent reality of war, technology, and the Internet, there live people: the scarred and delicate tissue of heart and body, ever healing, deceptively vulnerable, and increasingly alone.
ContributorsGarrison, Gary Joshua (Author) / Pritchard, Melissa (Thesis advisor) / Bell, Matt (Committee member) / Ison, Tara (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
Junctions is a story collection about people at a crossroads, people who crave guidance from an absent parent or partner, people who don't know how to make their next move. Many of the stories are set in and around Charleston where characters push back against having Southern traditions dictate the way they live. Ghosts and spirits roam the pages, helping or trapping the loved ones they are haunting. Elaborate meals, simple comfort food, and even the ceremonial sacrifice of a pelican carry the burden of bringing characters back from the brink of self-inflicted madness and isolation. The complexities of mother-daughter relationships are picked apart and cobbled back together over and over. In Junctions the only way for the characters to reach the next step is to wade through the toughest parts of being themselves.
ContributorsHickok, Chelsea (Author) / Ison, Tara (Thesis advisor) / Bell, Matt (Committee member) / McNally, Thomas (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
The Book of Mortimer is a satirical account about the rise of a new modern day Mormon woman prophet named Champ. The mother of six—and wife to a very codependent man that can’t be left alone with a comfortable couch—believes a new testament is buried in a small field conveniently next to her kids’ bus stop. Taking place in a lower class area constructed entirely of beige apartments in Mesa, Arizona, The Book of Mortimer plays on similar themes of the early day Mormon Church and reimagines this American religion if it were discovered in the 21st century. Complete with an elite Home Owner’s Association, a corrupt frozen pizza company, a ten-year old capitalist, a trio of milk purveyors that hold a group of unfortunates hostage in the biggest grocery store in The United States, and an elementary school that is quite possibly run by a Neo-Nazi principal hiding his identity, The Book of Mortimer is an exhaustively entertaining novel, exploring themes of poverty and class, relationships and commitment, and figuring out one’s self-worth in an overwhelming world of persuasion and guilt.
ContributorsWilcock, Heath (Author) / Ison, Tara (Thesis advisor) / Bell, Matt (Committee member) / Rios, Alberto (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
Rural Thrill is a broken fruit, an electric fence, and, at the end, the absence of body. It comes in three sections, with the first laying the foundation for the world in which the collection takes place—a small southern town, where there is obvious economic disparity and the supernatural is easily expected, believed, and in some cases, assumed. The second section focuses more closely on the main speaker of the collection who is growing into her own sexual desires against the backdrop of a murder which has swept through her town, complicating the speaker’s relationship to her body and the way she communicates desire. In the final section of the book, the poems come even closer as they explore the internal landscape of the speaker’s body and the many versions of the speaker that inhabit that place. The internal happenings of the third section of the book, reflect back on the external world mapped out in both the first and second sections. At the end, the energy of the body is all that remains with all boundaries of physicality erased, an example of how the body and mind negotiate safety in the face of risk and desire.
ContributorsAlbin, Lauren (Author) / Rios, Alberto (Thesis advisor) / Goldberg, Beckian F (Committee member) / Ball, Sally (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
This collection explores the experience of members of the working class, living at the edge of poverty. Under constant financial strain, they exist in a state of uncertainty which breeds anger, anxiety, fear, and resentment. For the children born into these families, options are limited not only by their financial circumstances, but also pre-existing cultural expectations. Characters have a desire to understand their circumstances, their relationships with others, and on a larger scale, the world as they experience it. To avoid falling victim to an emotional fatalism that contributes to externalized violence against the self and others, characters must recognize that they have control in their lives, even if it is limited.
ContributorsIrish, Jennifer Hanning (Author) / McNally, Michael T (Thesis advisor) / Pritchard, Melissa (Committee member) / Ison, Tara (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
Description
The purpose of this experimental study was to investigate the effects of textual and visual annotations on Spanish listening comprehension and vocabulary acquisition in the context of an online multimedia listening activity. 95 students who were enrolled in different sections of first year Spanish classes at a community college and a large southwestern university were randomly assigned to one of four versions of an online multimedia listening activity that contained textual and visual annotations of several key words. Students then took a comprehension and vocabulary posttest and a survey to measure cognitive load and general attitudes towards the program. Results indicated that textual annotations had a significant positive effect on listening comprehension and that visual annotations had a significant positive effect on how successful students felt. No statistically significant differences were found for other variables. Participants also reported positive attitudes towards vocabulary annotations and expressed a desire to see more annotations during multimedia listening activities of this type. These findings provide further evidence of the impact that multimedia may have on language acquisition. These findings have implications for multimedia design and for future research. Language listening activities should include a variety of vocabulary annotations that may help students to understand what they hear and to help them learn new vocabulary. Further research is needed outside of the laboratory, in the online and increasingly-mobile language learning environment in order to align the research with the environment in which many students currently study. The incorporation of motivation into multimedia learning theory and cognitive load should be explored, as well as new measures of cognitive load.
ContributorsCottam, Michael Evan (Author) / Savenye, Wilhelmina (Thesis advisor) / Klein, James D. (Committee member) / Atkinson, Robert (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2010