Professor of Graphic Design Jennifer McKnight (fourth from left) poses with students in her Motion Design class, including (left to right) Leland Cash, Thanh Ly, Geoffrey Walker, Isabelle Herman, Logan Foraker, Kristin Nelson and Dora Lanius, in front of the TILE 360 mural at John Burroughs School. (Photo courtesy of Jennifer McKnight)

From early January through April of this year, students at John Burroughs School in Ladue were able to learn about their fellow classmates’ hopes, dreams and goals for the future while walking to and from class. Just outside the school’s auditorium, a curved wall installation bore hundreds of handwritten resolutions from their fellow classmates scribbled on colorful pieces of paper.

Some, like “Join more clubs” or “Participate more in class,” reflected tangible goals for their student experience. Others got more personal: “Live in the moment,” “Be kinder to myself” or “Focus on the positive.”

The resolutions were the first phase of an interactive wall mural, “TILE 360 Reflect & Resolve,” created in partnership with the Department of Art and Design at the University of Missouri–St. Louis. From the start, the team at UMSL, including Jennifer McKnight, a professor of graphic design, and Scott Gericke, a former assistant teaching professor who now works at Loyola University New Orleans, wanted to approach the project a little differently.

“What’s unique about this is usually Burroughs invites designers and artists to share their work like a traditional exhibit where the art is framed behind glass,” Gericke said. “This was not that, and they really embraced it. We really wanted to do something different where people could actually interact and touch and transform it.”

With that in mind, the 30-foot-by-10-foot interactive mural featured a 360-tile grid with 36 horizontal rows and 10 vertical rows. Each pixel in the grid was made out of colored paper, and the mural featured three layers of yellow, pink and blue paper so that it could evolve over time by removing each sheet.

Because the piece was slated to be hung on Jan. 3, Gericke and McKnight immediately began thinking about the new year, including setting intentions and making resolutions. They created typography bearing the words “Resolve” and “Reflect” and invited the Burroughs community, including students and staff, to take it from there. Participants were encouraged to write down a reflection from the previous year or a resolution for the new one on a small piece of paper and hang it on the mural.

Students were encouraged to share resolutions and goals for the year. (Photo courtesy of Jennifer McKnight)

“What do a bunch of high school students want to think about in January?” McKnight said. “We really were thinking about the state of the world, the state of being young today. We were thinking about reflections on last year and also making resolutions for how to do things differently next year. And we thought that that could be a powerful way to help students think about the fact that change starts small and it starts local, and that little changes can end up being a big change. It was almost like Post Secret – they didn’t have their names on them and could write whatever they wanted.”

The Burroughs community quickly embraced the project; because of the overwhelming response, the mural team ended up leaving the first phrase up a little longer than initially intended. A group of honors students helped McKnight hang the notes in early February, and she said they were touched to see how the entire campus community – including their teachers – embraced the project. One note was written in Latin, for instance, which students quickly recognized as coming from their Latin teacher. As they hung the notes, they also started to notice big groups of ideas, such as being present or focusing on inner happiness.

“The kids were really hungry for words of hope, for the challenge to find a small goal to make this year 7% better this year,” McKnight said. “What I thought was really interesting was watching how interested the students were to hear the inner voices of what the other people at school were worrying about, what they were trying for, sort of what their headspace was. They found it very moving, and I think it meant something to them. It wasn’t more homework; it was everyone in the community sending up their hopes and wishes for the next year.”

For the project’s second phase, which was designed by the students at Burroughs and unveiled in mid-April, parts of the initial yellow layer were removed to reveal a pink layer underneath. Finally, in late April, a group of students from McKnight’s Motion Design class pulled back more paper to reveal a blue layer, featuring a design inspired by the arcade game Space Invaders. Students Leland Cash, Thanh Ly, Geoffrey Walker, Isabelle Herman, Logan Foraker, Kristin Nelson and Dora Lanius also took photos of the process that were edited down into a stop-motion video.

“The UMSL students spend a lot of time thinking about how to sequence images to make animations, so they were pretty excited for this project,” McKnight said. “They had a cross conversation about the piece with the students at Burroughs and there was a nice mentorship aspect. It was a great way to do UMSL outreach.”

Gericke and McKnight also saved all of the paper used in the project and repurposed it into notepads that they gave to students at a closing ceremony for the mural this summer. They wanted to not just find a way to reuse the paper but to leave students with a tangible way to continue to reflect and resolve.

“For us, this seemed like a project that had a lot of longevity and could continue to develop,” McKnight said. “We talked about it as a conversation between the groups involved, where we weren’t the ones just giving a message. It ended up being a really great collaboration between Burroughs students and staff, the two of us designers and then also UMSL students, so we were really honored to do this project with the community.”