Students will investigate how art communicates cultural history by listening to Louis Armstrong, examining Romare Bearden’s collages, and conducting real interviews with peers or adults about how visual art represents Black history. They will document insights in structured empathy maps grounded in direct quotes to prepare for defining a user-centered design challenge.

Students will synthesize interview data and historical research about Romare Bearden and Louis Armstrong into a clear, user-centered problem statement that will guide their collage and mural design. They will identify patterns across user insights, draft and critique How Might We questions, and justify their chosen problem definition with direct evidence.

Students will generate a wide range of collage and mural concepts grounded in real user research, then narrow their ideas using clear user-centered criteria. They will move from rapid divergent brainstorming to structured evaluation, producing annotated concept sketches that connect design choices to empathy findings and historical research on Romare Bearden and Louis Armstrong.

Students will build and refine low- and medium-fidelity prototypes of their Romare Bearden–inspired digital collages and collaborative mural layout, test them with real users, and document how feedback leads to concrete revisions grounded in historical accuracy and visual storytelling.

Students will conduct a final validation of their Bearden-inspired Cultural Canvas mural and individual digital collages with a new user, refine their work based on documented feedback, and present their full human-centered design journey to an authentic audience—tracing decisions from empathy interviews through iteration and final exhibition.