Healthy Designers, Graduating and Advancing the Field

Each year, Healthy Materials Lab has the honor of collaborating with a group of exceptional student researchers. These students not only contribute to our work with rigor and imagination; they also lead their own thesis explorations that reflect our shared commitment to equity, sustainability, and health in design.

This year’s graduating research assistants have tackled urgent questions through their final projects, from circularity in everyday appliances to transitional housing for displaced communities. Their work demonstrates how thoughtful design can challenge systems, reveal hidden stories, and build more just and resilient futures.

We’re proud to share highlights from their thesis work below.

“A Place for Us: Reclaiming Identity and Agency in Transitional Spaces” 
MFA Interior Design, Faculty: Maria Linares Trelles and Arianna Deane

What does it look like to design for the in-between; the years after emergency aid ends, but before full resettlement begins?

Khadeine Ali’s thesis explores this transitional period for displaced migrants, focusing on the 2–5 year mark when existing systems often fail to support integration. Working with migrants in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, she reimagined the local recreation center as a network of four adaptable spaces that support belonging, healing, and economic opportunity.

Each space serves a distinct purpose:

• The Kitchen offers access to industrial cooking facilities with blanket licensing to legitimize street vending
• The Sanctuary creates a culturally resonant spiritual refuge using elements like jali bricks
• The Forum functions as a flexible community gathering space
• The Memorial archives cultural memory through cyanotypes, a spice archive, and documentation stations

Co-creation was central to the process. Khadeine led workshops in cooking and photography that empowered participants to become knowledge-holders and community builders. Cyanotypes emerged as a coded visual language, legible only to those who made them, offering new tools for communication and solidarity.

Rather than reinforcing dependency, the project offers a replicable framework for migrant-led agency. It reframes displacement not as a pause in life, but as a fertile ground for rebuilding identity, culture, and connection.

“KETTLE: Rethinking Circularity of Household Appliances” 
MFA Transdisciplinary Design, Faculty: Jamer Hunt

How can we design small appliances to be easier to repair, and be part of a circular economy?

Ahmad Abbasi’s thesis focuses on reimagining one everyday object: the electric kettle. Through reverse-engineering, material analysis, and user interviews, Ahmad uncovered the barriers that prevent these common appliances from being repaired or recycled.

His redesign follows two principles:

• Ease of disassembly, using only a screwdriver
• Adherence to “Good Design”: functional, affordable, and aesthetically intentional

The new kettle features an exposed heating element for efficiency and transparency, encouraging user engagement with how the product works. While this choice challenged traditional aesthetic norms, it served as a visual marker of repairability and material honesty.

Ahmad’s participatory design process included peer feedback sessions to test sketches and models. User insights showed that people are far more likely to repair recognizable failures (like a power cord) than hidden components like heating elements. By revealing the inner workings, his design invites a shift in user behavior.

The project raises critical questions: What should circularity look like? How can we shift aesthetic expectations to promote sustainable, repairable products?

(See the full thesis here.)

“Hrystevsia House: Circular Housing for Displaced Communities in Ukraine” 
BFA Architectural Design, Faculty: Alison Mears and Bless Yee

What does sustainable housing look like for people displaced by war?

Aidan Murphy’s thesis transforms an abandoned administrative building in Kryvyi Rih, Ukraine, into multi-family housing for people displaced by the ongoing conflict. Drawing inspiration from dachas (self-sustaining farm houses and plots deeply woven into Ukrainian culture) the project models a closed-loop housing system grounded in food security and regenerative systems.

The design integrates:

• Dry toilets and aerobic composting to safely process human waste into nutrient-rich fertilizer
• On-site gardens and veggie stands to support local food production
• Hemp block insulation, built-in bunk beds, and window boxes to retrofit the old brick shell with new purpose

A preserved mural depicting 20th-century infrastructure - telecom towers, smokestacks, and pipelines- becomes a poignant visual link between Ukraine’s industrial past and its uncertain future. The rest of the interior is reimagined with flexibility and care to meet both immediate needs and long-term resilience.

Hrystevsia House proposes more than shelter; it models a regenerative housing typology rooted in history, circularity, and collective adaptation.

(More of Aidan’s work here.)

“GYLD: A Cultural Accelerator for Biomaterials” 
MS Strategic Design and Management, Faculty: Rhea Alexander

What if biomaterials were as desirable as they are sustainable?

Nij Balar’s thesis, co-created with Emma Kowalczyk, imagines a new cultural strategy to accelerate the adoption of regenerative materials in fashion. GYLD is a creative agency and platform that transforms how the public encounters biomaterials, like SCOBY, by embedding story-rich experiences into fashion retail environments. These immersive activations double as public exhibitions and market-testing labs, where consumers can engage with emerging materials in emotionally resonant settings.

Through a systems design approach, Nij and Emma identified a key gap: while biomaterial innovation is advancing, industry adoption remains slow. GYLD accomplishes two things:

• Closes the gap by connecting material innovators, fashion designers, and intentional consumers through narrative and space
• Shifts biomaterials from niche to mainstream, not by compromising on aesthetics, but by reframing them as aspirational and culturally relevant

Rooted in research, prototyping, and community engagement, GYLD proposes a replicable framework that turns curiosity into collective action, catalyzing a more circular, equitable fashion ecosystem.

We’re deeply grateful to Khadeine, Ahmad, Aidan, and Nij for the creativity, thoughtfulness, and research they brought to Healthy Materials Lab and their own design work. These projects reflect what’s possible when health, materiality, and community are placed at the center of design education.

We can’t wait to see how their work continues to shape a more equitable, sustainable future.