CINCINNATI (AP) - Jaimie Roudebush dons swim fins and a wet suit, straps on an oxygen tank and adjusts her scuba mask. The 20-year-old student isn't on a tropical vacation - she's on her way to class.
Along with her classmates at the University of Cincinnati, Roudebush is earning her scuba diving certification as part of an extreme environments design course in the school's College of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning.
Roudebush and her classmates will erect temporary shelters at the bottom of UC's Olympic-sized pool to experience the challenges of designing for underwater environments.
"You can talk about it in class, but you don't really understand until you deal with it," said Roudebush, of Whitehouse, Ohio. "On land you design structures to stay up, in water you need to hold them down."
Engineering and industrial design students at schools like the University of Texas at Austin, the Rhode Island School of Design and the University of Maryland have long been involved in projects for the extreme environment of space, but usually through simulated experiences in collaboration with NASA.
NASA also operates a program where qualifying undergraduate students design experiments and fly them in reduced gravity aircraft, but most students rarely experience extreme environments firsthand.
"I think UC's underwater course is unusual, said Michael Lye, NASA coordinator for the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence and an industrial design faculty member.
Lye's students are building simulation devices to experience gravity as it exists on the moon's surface. Extreme environment design courses challenge students' assumptions, he said.
"It increases their awareness of the need for human- or user-centered designs, even if they never design for extreme environments," Lye said.
Even tourism is moving into extreme environments. Guests at an aquatic research lab converted into an underwater motel off Key Largo can scuba dive to the lodge for a multiple-night stay. An underwater luxury hotel is under construction in the Persian Gulf off Dubai, with another planned for Fiji in the South Pacific.
Janis Connolly, who practices architecture as a NASA project manager for space human factors engineering at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, believes designing for extreme environments - while not mainstream - is developing as a specialty.
"If you are designing something for an underwater facility, you want to know what you are dealing with," Connolly said. "You can design well, but if it's not placed in context, you can't see where the flaws are."
UC course instructor Brian Davies said his students have learned from their design flaws.
"They've seen how important it is to work out things beforehand with underwater communication so difficult and how much oxygen and physical effort is required for even short projects," said Davies, an associate professor.
Roudebush was surprised by the weight differences.
"A 25-pound weight was fine on land, but I sank to the bottom with it in the water," she said.
Students last semester unsuccessfully tried to set up the framework for a temporary, tarp-covered shelter. This semester's class designed a makeshift diving bell intended to have enough oxygen at the top to allow a student to enter it and breathe temporarily under water without a mask.
The students initially didn't use enough weight to compensate for displaced water in the bubble-topped structure and had to add another 160 pounds.
"A pool obviously doesn't present all the challenges encountered in the sea, but even here you deal with temperature, buoyancy and an environment where gravity doesn't apply so much," Davies said.
Class members don't have to scuba dive, but all of them are involved in the design and will use what they learn to design elaborate underwater structures such as research facilities for an international underwater design competition.
Larisa Forester, of Indianapolis, is interested in specializing in underwater design and hopes to design underwater research or learning facilities.
"I never expected to have the chance to scuba dive and get real underwater experience in an architecture class," said Forester. "This has given me a new sense of excitement about all the possibilities."

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