Brooklyn LAB

Post COVID-19 public resource to rebuild school communities

Role

Communication design, Consulting

Team

Dezudio Studio
Brooklyn LAB Charter School
Various Professional Educators

Duration

4 Weeks

Challenge

In the summer of 2021, I was a design intern for Dezudio, a design agency in Pittsburgh. They partnered with Brooklyn LAB Charter School and various educational partners to publish a resource to help create stronger school culture and educational communities after COVID-19. To start the conversation, they asked the team the following:

What are the most impactful things schools can do to meet the unique and diverse needs of our students and create a thriving culture as they return to school during the 2021–22 school year?

Outcome

To develop this public resource, each intern partnered with a professional educator to discuss and turn their ideas to life. These concepts were stitched together with a cohesive design style. The final product, Building Culture Back Better, is an actionable resource for schools across the country to generate and modify relevant, evidence-based solutions to longstanding challenges in education that have been amplified by the pandemic. 

I personally worked with Dave Stuart Jr., an educator and writer, to develop his portion. The following are selected slides from the document.​

The Design Process

Our role as a designer was to a consultant to these educational experts to draft up ideas, sketches, and assist them in publishing their piece. The process started with the partner providing their own initial research and presenting their work for feedback to Brooklyn LAB. Afterwards, Dezudio and its interns would facilitate, design frameworks and present them to help develop and shape their ideas into a finished deliverable. This was a two week process.

Initial Presentations + Discovery

For two weeks, I had the pleasure of working with Dave Stuart Jr., a high school teacher, writer, and professional development specialist. In our first meeting, he presented his approach. Through our conversations, we would come up with a visual methodology to best relay his proposal in creating a thriving student culture for the 2021 - 2022 school year.

Dave had focused his approach on building healthy school culture by having teachers utilize five key beliefs and student motivation in their classrooms. He believed that if teachers could tap into these five beliefs, it would be the key to understand student motivation and keep classroom lively and well.

"The biggest thing you have to solve when trying to impact schools is people. You cannot change schools without changing people, because schools are people-intensive. "
- Dave Stuart Jr.

Ideation + Development

Dave believed that there were five beliefs that existed in each student and teachers had to tap into each specific one to instill a belief. They are also dependent on one other for students to stay motivated in the classroom. To express this idea and beliefs, I explored different metaphors and sketches that would convey these ideas. The first option were puzzle pieces to imply each belief built off each other and equally needed each other. The second option was a pyramid to imply that each belief was built on top of each other and you would need a steady base to the next one.

Eventually, we settled in on the pyramid because Dave and I wanted to incorporate this idea of building beliefs to be a journey. We added the idea of an individual climbing the mountain to reach the goal. On this path, the educator would also be building and developing all of the beliefs. The final result was a classroom culture that accompanies students with all diverse backgrounds and needs.

Following this metaphor, the five key beliefs were then split into individual slides to explained in detail. Dave had also specified that these beliefs existed on a spectrum, from belief to questioning to fear and to unbelief. We wanted to display this with examples of each value so teachers could refer back to it.

From the Classroom to School

To wrap up his presentation, Dave had thoughts on how this approach could eventually lead to a change in school culture. It started at the individual level and would slowly affect other students and teachers, leading to more classrooms and eventually schools. To visualize this influence, we thought about a hive mentality, especially with how one student could affect one another until the classroom was filled with motivation.

Primary Sketches

͢

Finished Diagram

The Finished Product

Finally, the framework and sketches were passed through two rounds of feedback. Once approved, we applied a consistent style across all educational collaborators and stitched all the documents together. It went through a final review and then published by Brooklyn LAB. You can find the entire document through the link.

Reflection

For this project, the three-week timeline was a whirlwind but because of these time constraints, it played a role in generating ideas and moving forward with decisions quickly. As an intern for Dezudio, I got the chance to take the design lead for several collaborators and also participate in conversations tackling present-day issues like inclusivity and the impact of COVID-19 in the school spectre.

Joint Collaboration: It was enjoyable to work with various educational experts like Dave over the three weeks. I got the chance to learn from their knowledge and perspective. This in turn, widened my understanding of education, especially leading and running classrooms.

Visual Collaboration: When coming up with sketches, the importance of design principles and terminology such as visual hierarchy and contrast was valuable. By employing these principles, it was easier to verbally communicate to a client why some designs worked better than others.

Previous Project

Previous Project

Thanks for visiting!

(c) for christina 2025

Thanks for visiting!

(c) for christina 2025

Thanks for visiting!

(c) for christina 2025