SIDE-EYE
Designing a reflective learning system that transforms observation, qualitative inquiry, and lived experience into actionable design practice.
Project Snapshot
Role
Creative Director, Educational Designer, Visual Systems Designer, Course Designer
Context
Critical Media Literacy course within the Educational Design for Transformative Social Futures undergraduate specialization, Earl Center for Learning & Innovation at Boston University, Wheelock College of Education & Human Development
Focus
Editorial pedagogy, critical media literacy, multimodal learning, speculative media production, visual systems
Format
Experimental digital publication system, podcast concepts, magazine covers, media prompts, critical scripts, visual frameworks
Timeline
Spring semester / course companion prototype
Collaborators
Developed in relation to student discussions, course themes, and emerging classroom needs
The Problem Wasn’t Content. It Was Atmosphere.
Critical Media Literacy asks students to examine the systems shaping everyday life: representation, ideology, algorithms, humor, gender, objectivity, platforms, persuasion, and power.
But these ideas are not static. They move through culture as images, headlines, feeds, jokes, trends, podcasts, interfaces, aesthetics, and stories.
The design challenge was not simply how to explain critical media concepts. It was how to create a learning environment where those concepts could feel active, contemporary, debatable, and alive.
SIDE-EYE emerged from that tension.
It asked what might happen if media literacy was taught through media — if critique became aesthetic practice, and creative production became a way of thinking.
Embedded prompts, visual frameworks, annotation structures, and reflective exercises supported ongoing synthesis across observation, dialogue, fieldwork, and collaborative critique.
Editorial Design as Pedagogy
SIDE-EYE treated editorial design as a pedagogical system.
Each artifact framed attention differently. A magazine cover could stage a cultural tension. A podcast concept could turn theory into dialogue. A speculative headline could make ideology visible. A visual framework could help students map relationships between media, power, identity, and interpretation.
The system did not ask students to study critical theory.
It invited them to enter it, question it, remix it, and produce with it.
Inside the SIDE-EYE Systems
SIDE-EYE was built as an ecosystem of formats, each offering a different way into critical media literacy: visual, auditory, narrative, analytical, speculative, and participatory.
EDITORIALIZED IMAGINATION AS PEDAGOGY
04—Theory operationalized through inquiry
