Imagine spending a week in a town that is new to you and learning as much as you can about it so that at the end of the week you can offer suggestions for sustaining and improving the community.
This quick study is the task a small group of college students — five from Iowa State University and six from the University of Iowa — have set themselves to complete, and they hit the ground running Monday morning, talking to townspeople and tradespeople and trying to figure out where they are: Perry.
“It’s called moonshotting,” said Jamison Brus, an ISU undergraduate in community planning. “It’s the theory of having the rocket propel itself around the moon with no fuel, which is kind of like the small things we can do that can fuel results, that starts small and just gets bigger and bigger.”
Brus is unusual. He and Reny Rebariah, an ISU graduate student in urban design and social architecture, are the only team members who are not graphic arts students at ISU or the U of I. All six Iowa students are undergrads in graphic design, and four of the Iowa Staters are graduate students in graphic design.
Perry Project/Proyecto Perry is the official name of the week-long, student-run initiative to research Perry and create projects based off of their findings that further the town’s promising prospects. The projects emerge and evolve as the designers learn about Perry and what Perry people like, dislike and dream for the future.
“It’s a lot of adapting,” Brus said, “a lot of just growing the project, trying to see what works. It’s really exciting.”
After sampling local opinions with a whiteboard, one group of students built a mobile blackboard to place at different points around town. The three-sided pillar has a different question on each side, and anyone can write their answers to: “What I like most about Perry is . . .” and “What I dislike most about Perry is . . .” and “What I most want to see in Perry is . . .”
The week’s projects will be made using local resources, whatever can be found at the variety store or hardware store or grocery store.
“It’s just a process where we have $100 a day,” Brus said, “and if we don’t use the money from one day, we have extra. Our instructors run back and forth, getting us materials as we need them, so as the projects get bigger and bigger, and the money we use will get more and more as we progress through the projects.”
He said preliminary findings reveal divisions within the community and a desire for strength through solidarity and for unity in diversity.
“We’re just trying to bring people together,” Brus said, “because we saw that as kind of a common trait — between racial groups, age groups — there’s kind of a divide that we see, and we kind of want to find ways to bring them together, so yesterday we went out to Fareway, a group of us, and we’re actually starting to advertise now and have a Facebook account and kind of explain more what we’re doing, going through and asking people what is unique about Perry.”
The long-term plan, beyond this week’s microprojects, is to make Perry something of a satellite laboratory for the universities’ graphic design students, according to the faculty leaders of the Perry Project/Proyecto Perry.
“This will be the first of many,” said Professor Bernard Canniffe, chair of the Iowa State University Department of Graphic Design. “That is our hope. This is part one. One of the end goals is to have some kind of base for Iowa State and the University of Iowa graphic design. If it were always kind of a summer experience, that could be possibility one, like a community outreach design thing. Another goal is to build on what we do now and then go for funding to make them real, actualize them. So whatever the ideas that they pitch the community, if the community loves some of those, then we’re going to go for money and come back and take it to the next level.”
Jeremy Swanston, assistant professor of graphic design at the University of Iowa, said the original idea for a Perry Project/Proyecto Perry was born more than two years ago.
The students will wrap up their whirlwind study with final presentations at noon Friday at La Poste, and “I know, too, we’re also doing a kind of mock teaser of a presentation on Thursday night,” Brus said, “because there’s going to be an event downstairs.”
For more information about the Perry Project/Proyecto Perry, visit their Facebook page.
