Northwest Missouri State University - Tower Yearbook (Maryville, MO)

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All men are designers. All that we do, almost all the time, is design, for design is basic to all human activity. The planning and patterning of any act towards a desired, forseeable end constitutes the design process. The class was Art 490, Advanced Design, summer session 1973. The test was Design For The Real World by Victor Papanek. Design is composing an epic poem, executing a mural, painting a masterpiece, writing a concerto. But design is also cleaning and reorganiz- ing a desk drawer, pulling an im- pacted tooth, baking an apple pie, choosing sides for a backlot baseball game, and educating a child. Design is the conscious effort to impose meaningful order. Using $500 furnished by NWMSU, the class of 19 students, under the supervision of Tom Sayer, assistant professor of art, took their classroom into the field by designing and building a play area in the picnic grounds west of College Courts, the trailer park for married students. In this way the students were given a chance to test the ideas given in classroom lectures and the text, lear- ning through actual experience. . . . design has become the most powerful tool with which man shapes his tools and environments (and by extension, society and himself). This demands high social and moral responsibility from the designer. After considering the uses of a playground — a play area for children, and the needs of a playground — textures to feel, colors to see, places to jump, crawl, climb, and dig, several plans were drawn. Then the class picked several of the designs which they felt fit the re- quirements best and which were aesthetically pleasing. (continued) . V»»- 27

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firi no id con 1 Dei lest AclyciAced De iQn 26

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J (Aduanced Design continued) . . . We must Stop defiling th e earth itself with poorly-designed objects and structures. Three structures were built, the local children volunteering to help. A geodesic dome built by an advanced design student three years earlier was donated to the park and placed under the large trees at the south end of the playground. Many telephone poles, cut and fit together into a series of vertical and horizontal poles at different heights, provided a support for a canvas-covered, four-tire inner- tube swing. And a tetrahedron- shaped climbing form was built, with sand pits on two sides and a foam- rubber-filled canvas bag on which children could jump along the third side. (continued) 2B