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by Gary Olsen, Media Developer, Dubuque Community School District

his website serves as the official headquarters for a new show I'm producing on DCS-TV Cable Channel 19 entitled, Designer's Club. Like other broadcast enterprises of the Dubuque Community School District, we provide programming for Mediacom Cable Television. Some of our programs end up on state-wide Mediacom Channel 22 that serves communities such as Des Moines, the Quad Cities , Waterloo, Cedar Rapids and Iowa City. Designer's Club follows the great successes of Kids in the Kitchen, The Garden Organic, and Chopper School.

Designer's Club is in its third year and we couldn't be more proud of our efforts.

The idea for Designer's Club and the name for the program came from Kris Nauman. Kris is a professional designer who is a mom with four school-age children, and she volunteered to get the program off the ground. The concept for the show grew from a chance meeting we had on the set of The Garden Organic . Kris lives across the street from the garden in Barrington Lake, and she had been observing the weekly filming while her new house was being built. She made fast friends with her neighbor and the show's producer, Megan Dalsing, who then introduced her to me. Kris offered to help decorate for the end-of-season wrap party in which the parents and sponsors were invited. I was impressed with her flower arrangements, her enthusiasm and the variety of organic and found objects she incorporated in her designs. We hit it off right away, and we had our first show scheduled within a month of that meeting.

Our primary learning objective in these episodes is to teach design through easy-to-do projects involving organic and found objects, live and preserved plants and vessels of every size, shape and discription. The show's mission is finding organic design in nature. It is also our show's mission to provide hands-on lessons in floral design and home decor. We teach visual strategies to convey an idea and a feeling, and we apply the lessons of line, shape, composition, texture, contrast, and color to everything we do. This is an excellent beginning for the budding designer. If you know how to decorate a space, you can move in several different directions from this point.

In three years we've managed to branch out into other design endeavors. I want to impress students with the excitement of pursuing a design career. Virtually every company in the world must depend on the services of a designer for new product development, marketing, and communication. In fact, it is a designer who maintains this website. Designers maintain virtually all websites in the world.

This show is collaboration among the Dubuque Community Schools and the Dubuque Design Community, its practitioners and suppliers. This not only includes home decor, floral designers, and interior designers, but also the furniture industry, paint, hardware and do-it-yourself industries. And we don't want to forget the vast craft market. For example, did you know there almost 10 places in Dubuque where you can obtain the services of a professional picture framer? The topical possibilities for a show like this are endless.

We plan on seasonal shows that will feature holiday decorating, and we will also showcase special occasion and party decorating. We also will tour the businesses and talk with professional designers in all areas of design.

All of this will involve students. We are going to focus our attention on middle school and early high school-age children. This age group's tastes and design sense are, for the most part, a reflection of their parents, but now they are beginning to see and understand a much larger world.

They are experimenting with fashion. They are beginning to grasp the concept of visual communication, and they are thinking more abstractly, less literally. They are beginning to develop a personal style. It is at this age they begin developing personal tastes and sensibilities that will carry them on to adulthood. This is also the time they develop a somewhat more sophisticated sense of humor.

Plus, design and creativity are fun and life affirming. It is what distinguishes our species, and it's what contributes to our quality of life. Design also defines our cultural and historical roots while inspiring us to glimpse into the future. We are constantly reorganizing our spaces, building better and more exciting products. It is our nature to design and redesign. We are continually engaged in this enterprise that combines line, shape, composition, texture, contrast and color. Even if you don't consider yourself particularly creative, I'll bet you've taken a photo with a point-and-shoot camera, looked at the results and said, "That's a great picture!" You may not know why it was great, but guess what? It's your start in the world of design.

We are constantly absorbing those things in our environment we find stimulating, and then incorporating them into our own flights of self expression. Design, after all, is the result of an active, imaginative and inventive mind.