Deconstructing DesignReckoning in Pixels™

Program 03

Workshops & Education

Interactive programs that engage local schools and community groups in hands-on design thinking, sustainable material use, and cultural preservation through artistic practice.

Collage: a teacher leans over a table where four students draw around a wooden block model, with brownstones, a timber frame, plans, and material samples layered around them.

  1. Learning by making

    Prototype · Build · Reflect

    Design thinking is taught with hands in the material — students prototype, build, and reflect, rather than only listen.

  2. Cultural preservation

    Recipes · Crafts · Land knowledge

    Workshops treat inherited technique as curriculum: recipes, crafts, and land knowledge passed forward as design education.

How the program runs

Three workshops

  1. Mapping Food Systems and Inequality

    Shadowing · Crowd sourcing · Food mapping

    A week of meals, recorded and read together; a corridor of storefronts, counted. Students learn to see a food system as a designed thing — where the grocery stores are not, and why — and to draw the evidence themselves rather than be handed it. The method comes from six co-design workshops run with East New York schools and gardens, and it was built to travel: the study's own word for it is duplicable.

  2. CoDesigning Partnerships

    Co-design · Community · Collaboration · Ownership

    Research with, not on. Schools, community gardens, local businesses, and city agencies sit at one table and design the program they will run together — who plants, who teaches, who owns the outcome. The East New York study turned that table into a road map for collaboration between garden organizations and local schools. This workshop teaches the road map, and ends with a partnership drawn up rather than described.

  3. Housing Justice Data Analysis and Review

    Policy fragments · Census data · Parcel maps

    Redlining maps, urban renewal plans, rezonings, tax-lien sales: the record of how Brooklyn's Black neighborhoods were taken apart exists, in public, in documents. Participants learn to read those documents the way the work does — pulling a policy fragment, a census table, and a parcel map into one layer and testing what the paper trail actually shows. Every public claim must be traceable. Here you learn to trace one.

Source East New York (2022); Urban Dispossession: Why Brooklyn?; Brooklyn: The Architecture of Displacement The methods above are drawn from these works

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