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Poetter Hall was purchased by the SCAD founders in March 1979. Classes began in September of that year.  
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The Arts

Waste not, want not

Brent Freeman’s Yucca Mountain warning marker

Brent Freeman’s Yucca Mountain warning marker is on display at www.scad.edu/exhibitions.

By Hannah Pittard
Published: Friday, May 9, 2003

Nevada’s Yucca Mountain was authorized as the official and permanent repository for at least 77,000 tons of nuclear waste after a Senate vote in July 2002. A consequence of this vote was a license application and approval process with several contingencies — one of them being the development of a warning system whose physical and educational endurance is capable of lasting 10,000 years because a nuclear waste site endures at least this long and cannot be disturbed while volatile.

“What future societies do is not in our control,” said a paper prepared by Abraham Van Luik of the Energy’s Office of Repository Development presented in February at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. “What those future societies know can be influenced by the information we leave for them.”

To this end, graphic design professor Chercy Lott charged her alternative design students with the assignment of creating Yucca Mountain nuclear waste warning markers that could last and communicate into the future. “The assignment was to explain and demonstrate how to inform people at least 1,000 years from now about the inadvisability of drilling in or around, or disturbing in any way, a nuclear waste site from the present,” said Lott. “Currently, the government is spending monies to address this situation and discover a feasible solution. Therefore, I felt it was an excellent challenge for the students.”

Students could use any material in designing the project as long as it worked within their concept and could be realistically applied. The assignment required them to create an 11-by-17-inch poster and a detail specification booklet on which materials would be used, where the marker would be placed and what sort of research went into creating the final solution. After research and designs were completed, Lott’s students compiled a book of their concepts, which the Department of Energy in Washington, D.C., then displayed and showed to their senior scientists as well as The Wall Street Journal.

Although college members were not privy to the Department of Energy’s official meeting and exhibition, the students’ suggested solutions are accessible online at www.scad.edu/exhibitions/. What you’ll see when visiting this site are the surprisingly aesthetic concepts of Brent Freeman, Brooke Piasecki, Eli Pianka, Gillian Martindale, Maho Kishi, Nina Svebeck and Tim Dozer. The approaches of these seven range from Piasecki and Svebeck’s more traditional notions of danger signs to Dozer and Kishi’s simple, yet remarkably effective suggestions to Freeman, Pianka and Martindale’s eerie combination of convention and futurism.

“Just recently, the organization called Desert Space, which is touring and exhibiting all of the different submissions for the Yucca Mountain site, has asked me if the students would like their work to be involved,” said Lott. “I am very excited and pleased for the students.”

The Yucca Mountain nuclear waste markers by professor Chercy Lott’s Alternative Design class are accessible online at www.scad.edu/exhibitions/.