I have been checking this website for awhile, since I can take a look at the thesis projects that have been done by the students.

There are more than 20 of them to look at.

Which give me a more clear idea about the definition of thesis project.

School of Visual Arts (SVA) is a college of art and design whose mission is to educate students who aspire to become professional artists or to work in arts' many related fields.

Here is one of the thesis project that have done by Jamie Prokel.

Since the topic of my group project is related to garbage, therefore this thesis project attracted me.

Jamie's thesis project is called recycle this. Recycling made easy. With so many complicated messages about recycling coming at us everyday, "recycle this" provides support for deciphering them. "recycle this - Introduction to Recycling Kit” you have the tools to set up your own home recycling center in minutes and all the information to begin using it.

Know it all - by Stacy Schiff

• CAN WIKIPEDIA CONQUER EXPERTISE ?
• Wikipedia functions as a filter for vast amounts of information online, and it could be said that Google owes the site for tidying up the neighborhood.
• Anyone with Internet access can create a Wikipedia entry or edit an existing one.
• Wikipedia, which began as an experiment in unfettered democracy, has sprouted policies and procedures.
• At the same time, the site embodies our newly casual relationship to truth.
• the wiki, a simple software tool that allows for collaborative writing and editing.
• At the beginning, there were no formal rules, though Sanger eventually posted a set of guidelines on the site. The first was "Ignore all the rules." Two of the others have become central tenets: articles must reflect a neutral point of view, and their content must be both verifiable and previously published.
• Is Wikipedia accurate?
• According to the survey, Wikipedia had four errors for every three of Britannica's, a result that, oddly, was hailed as a triumph for the upstart.
• Larry Sanger proposes a fine distinction between knowledge that is useful and knowledge that is reliable, and there is no question that Wikipedia beats every other source when it comes to breadth, efficiency, and accessibility. Yet the site's virtues are also liabilities.
• The bulk of Wikipedia's content originates not in the stacks but on the Web, which offers up everything from breaking news, spin, and gossip to proof that the moon landings never took place.
• Wikipedia remains a lumpy work in progress. The entries can read as though they had been written by a seventh grader: clarity and concision are lacking; the facts may be sturdy, but the connective tissue is either anemic or absent; and citation is hit or miss.
• As was the Encyclopedia, Wikipedia is a combination of manifesto and reference work.

OUT OF PRINT-the death and life of the american newspaper by ERIC Altherman

• Few believe that newspapers in their current printed form will survive. Newspaper companies are losing advertisers, readers, market value, and, in some cases, their sense of mission at a pace that would have been barely imaginable just four years ago.
• Trends in circulation and advertising––the rise of the Internet, which has made the daily newspaper look slow and unresponsive; the advent of Craigslist, which is wiping out classified advertising––have created a palpable sense of doom.
• In the Internet age, however, no one has figured out how to rescue the newspaper in the United States or abroad. Newspapers have created Web sites that benefit from the growth of online advertising, but the sums are not nearly enough to replace the loss in revenue from circulation and print ads.
• Most managers in the industry have reacted to the collapse of their business model with a spiral of budget cuts, bureau closings, buyouts, layoffs, and reductions in page size and column inches. Since 1990, a quarter of all American newspaper jobs have disappeared. The columnist Molly Ivins complained, shortly before her death, that the newspaper companies’ solution to their problem was to make “our product smaller and less helpful and less interesting.”
• Internet, which is about to pass newspapers as a source of political news for American readers. For young people, and for the most politically engaged, it has already done so.
• Many newspapers, in their eagerness to demonstrate a sense of balance and impartiality, do not allow reporters to voice their opinions publicly, march in demonstrations, volunteer in political campaigns, wear political buttons, or attach bumper stickers to their cars.
• Public trust in newspapers has been slipping at least as quickly as the bottom line. A recent study published
• by Sacred Heart University found that fewer than twenty per cent of Americans said they could believe “all or most” media reporting, a figure that has fallen from more than twenty-seven per cent just five years ago.
• Today’s consumers “want news on demand, continuously updated. They want a point of view about not just what happened but why it happened. . . . And finally, they want to be able to use the information in a larger community—to talk about, to debate, to question, and even to meet people who think about the world in similar or different ways.
• On the Huffington Post, Peretti explains news is not something handed down from above but “a shared enterprise between its producer and its consumer.”
• Echoing Murdoch, he says that the Internet offers editors “immediate information” about which stories interest readers, provoke comments, are shared with friends, and generate the greatest number of Web searches. An Internet-based news site, Peretti contends, is therefore “alive in a way that is impossible for paper and ink.”
• Though Huffington has a news staff (it is tiny, but the hope is to expand in the future), the vast majority of the stories that it features originate elsewhere, whether in print, on television, or on someone’s video camera or cell phone. The editors link to whatever they believe to be the best story on a given topic. Then they repurpose it with a catchy, often liberal-leaning headline and provide a comment section beneath it, where readers can chime in.
• “Traditional media just need to realize that the online world isn’t the enemy. In fact, it’s the thing that will save them, if they fully embrace it.”
• What most impresses advertisers—and depresses newspaper-company executives—is the site’s growth numbers.
• It is not unusual for a short blog post to inspire a thousand posts from readers—posts that go off in their own directions and lead to arguments and conversations unrelated to the topic that inspired them.
• The Huffington Post’s editorial processes are based on what Peretti has named the “mullet strategy.” (“Business up front, party in the back” is how his trend-spotting site BuzzFeed glosses it.) The mullet strategy invites users to “argue and vent on the secondary pages, but professional editors keep the front page looking sharp. The mullet strategy is here to stay, because the best way for Web companies to increase traffic is to let users have control, but the best way to sell advertising is a slick, pretty front page where corporate sponsors can admire their brands.”
• Lippmann proposed the creation of “intelligence bureaus,” which would be given access to all the information they needed to judge the government’s actions without concerning themselves much with
• democratic preferences or public debate. Just what, if any, role the public would play in this process Lippmann never explained.
• the journalism scholar James W. Carey, in describing the debate, called “certain vital habits” of democracy—the ability to discuss, deliberate on, and debate various perspectives in a manner that would move it toward consensus.

Method Designing:Jessica Helfand

Method Designing: The Paradox of Modern Design Education

Jessica Helfand

• Konstantin Stanislavsky revolutionized the modern theatre by introducing a new system of training, in which the actor would draw on his or her own emotions to achieve a true understanding of a character.
• protested against the old manner of acting and against theatricality, against artificial pathos and declamation,"
• If you could achieve this honesty, your performance would resonate with a kind of pitch-perfect humanity and you had a far better chance of truly engaging your audience as a result
• the part that glorifies feeling and celebrates vanity; the part that amplifies personal memory and replays it as objective truth. It's extremely subjective and it's extremely seductive and more often than not, it's extremely misplaced as graphic design.
• The good news is that in an effort to produce designers who can think for themselves. -Such an emphasis on authorship is, by and large, a way to train young designers as thinkers — and not merely as service providers.
• At the same time, we encourage them to seek references beyond the obvious: the richness of their sources testifies to an ability to engage a larger universe, and their work benefits from locating itself along a trajectory they've chosen and defined for themselves.
• The bad news is that as a consequence of seeking validation elsewhere, there is an unusual bias toward false identity: so the design student, after looking at so much art, believes that s/he is making art. The design student, after considering so deeply the intangible forces framing the interpretation of visual form, comes to believe that the very act of interpretation is itself the form. This is where the method backfires so paradoxically: in being true to ourselves, we distance ourselves from a more universal truth.

Where did we go wrong? The problem with method designing is not our students' problem: it is our problem. Let's teach our students to keep asking difficult questions, to keep solving harder problems, to keep inventing better worlds and yes, to be true to themselves. As emissaries of visual communication, our audiences deserve nothing less. To better understand ourselves as authors requires a certain amount of self-reflection, but when did the mirror of autobiography become our canvas, our public lens to the world? If such self-love leads to more honest communication, to more novel form-making, to more meaningful solutions, then so much the better. But for designers, such self-knowledge can not be a method. It is simply a motive.

Focusing Your Research Efforts-Leedy, Paul D., and Jeanne Ellis Ormrod

The problem must be expressed with the utmost precision;it should be then be divided into more manageable subproblems.

The heart of every research proect is the problem. To see the problem with unwavering clarity and to state it in precise and unmistakable terms is the first requirement in the research process.

BASIC RESEARCH

Some research projects are intended to enhance basic knowledge about the phyical, biological or social world. For example, a psychologist might study the nature of people’s cognitive processes. Such project, which can advance human beigns’theoetical conceptualizations about a particular topic, are known as BASIC RESEARCH.

APPLIED RESEARCH

Research project that intended to address issues that have immediate relevance to current practices, procedures and policies. For example, a nursing educator might compare the effectiveness of different strategies for training future nurses. Such projects , which can inform human decision making about practical problems are known as applied research .

Some problems are not suitable for research because they lack the "interpretation of data" requirement; they do not elicit a mental struggle on the part of the researcher to force the data to reveal their meaning. Following are four situations to avoid when considering a problem for research purposes:

1.  Research projects should not be a ruse for achieving self-enlightenment. All of us have large holes in our education, and filling them is perhaps the greatest joy of learning. But self-enlightenment is not the purpose of research. Gathering information to know more about a certain area of know 1-edge is entirely different from looking at a body of data to discern how it contributes to the solution of the problem.

A problem whose sole purpose is to compare two sets of data is not a suitable research problem.

Calculating a coefficient of correlation between two sets of data to show a relationship between them is not acceptable as a problem for research.

Problems that result in a yes or no answer are not suitable problems for research.

FINDING A LEGITIMATE

As a general rule, appropriate research projects don't fall out of trees and hit you on the head.

Must be sufficiently knowledgeable about your topic of interest to know what projects might

Make important contributions to the field. Following are several strategies that are often helpful for novice and expert researchers alike.

Look around you

smaller problems suitable for research exist everywhere. Perhaps you might see them in your professional practice or in everyday events.

Read the literature

3.     • Address the suggestions for future research that another researcher has offered

4.     • Replicate a research project in a different setting or with a different population

5.     • Consider how various subpopulations might behave differently in the same situation

6.     • Apply an existing perspective or explanation to a new situation

7.     • Explore unexpected or contradictory findings in previous studies

8.     • Challenge research findings that seem to contradict what you know or believe to be true

9.     (Neuman, 1994)

 Reading the literature has other advantages as well. It gives you a theoretical base on which to build a rationale for your study. It provides potential research methodologies and methods of measurement.

-Attend professional conference

-Seek the advice of experts

-Choose a topic that intrigues and motivates you

-Choose a topic that others will find interesting and worthy of attention

 

Stating the Research Problem

1.  -State the problem clearly and completely

2.  -Think through the feasibility of the project that the problem implies.

3.  -Say precisely what you mean.

4.   -Edit your work.