The friendship has been all tied up with yarn, connecting the trees that line the brick pathway and making students stop to reevaluate their surroundings.
Some bikes got tangled in the yarn while other passer-bys voluntarily walked into the design, viewing the trees through lines created by the red and white strands of yarn.
“Everybody walks through [the friendship walk],” Ryan Mora, a senior design major who helped create the project for class, said. “We wanted to emphasize the beauty of that spot with the design.”
The yarn tactic worked, attracting about eighty percent of the people who walked by, according to Mora.
“A lot of people came up to us,” he said. “People would stop texting and take pictures of it.”
The class project was constructed on Sept. 19. Four groups in the class were required to design in an outside environment and present in class what they found, assistant design professor Heather Barker said.
“One of the critical components in my class is that they have to make sure people interact with the design,” she said. “Design is often see by many as ‘fluff’ … [However,] it’s really crucial.”
Classmates Mora and senior design major Alana Johnson got together with a group of five to complete the project. The prompt allowed for a lot of freedom among the groups.
According to Baker, different groups created political designs, touching on issues like the corruption of oil companies and the dwindling number of local parks. However, Mora’s group took a simpler route, using only one material.
“They had one of the strongest designs,” Baker said. “You can make such a bigger impact with a much smaller move.”
Johnson said the design was intentionally simple.
“The class is based in outside environment and how can you change it,” she said. “[The design] was very minimal, but it had a big impact.”
Johnson, who is also the arts commissioner for Associated Students, Inc., said she has been designing ever since she was young.
Aside from redesigning rooms in her own home, Johnson worked on renovating the ASI office during the summer.
“I was able to design new offices,” she said. “For now, it’s just having that experience and building up my portfolio.”
Even though the class promotes designing in an outside environment, Johnson said that the skill sets learned could help her efforts to become a product or set designer, which requires “a space to be built within a space.”
Mora, who became interested in pursing a career as an architect in 2008, also said the project helped open his eyes to other facets in the field.
“I started to think about how it affects the environment,” he said. “When walking around the city … people don’t realize how important it is to have that structure.”
Mora said the class not only focuses on the outside environment, but it also explores cultural structure and communication of design. The next class project will require students to make a new design for a Disney amusement park located in a foreign country with different cultural structure, Mora said.
“Design is so important, he said. “Design in general is based on psychology.”