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

Page 32 text:

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

Page 34 text:

(Advanced Design continued) As long as design concerns itself with confecting trivial toys for adults, kill- ing machines with gleaming tailfins, and sexed-up shrouds for typewriters, toasters, telephones, and computers, it has lost all reason to exist. The actual building of the designs brought in factors not in classroom situations. Along with the limitations of a budget, which are easy to ignore if you aren ' t really buying materials, the construction brought out flaws not apparent in the drawn design, such as insufficient structural sup- port. These problems required modifications to the structures as they were being built. No structure at the park was finished identically to the plans drawn at the beginning of the course. All of the problems encountered are a part of the design process. If the designer doesn ' t grow and improve upon his own knowledge, then neither will his designs grow and im- prove. D OL Quoted material from Design For The Real World by Victor Papanek, copyright 1973, used with permission of Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc. 30