The same day that a trip to Burning Man was proposed to me, I began thinking of a shade structure. Our group was going to need a space where we could hang out together and avoid the harsh sun.
I did some research on shade structures at Burning Man. A lot of people and camps build their own geodesic domes. I had been excited by geodesics for a while and had built some interesting models of different geodesics.
What I wanted to build was a non-traditional dome approximately 30 feet in diameter. The original sketches are lost, but they were similar to the picture below.