In April 1988 I attended the 25th anniversary reunion of the Design Science program at Harvard University's Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts . Although I hadn't actually attended the program, let alone Harvard, I felt such kinship with this merry band of artist-mathematicians that I showed up anyway. The program, founded by Harvard professor Arthur Loeb, is a uniquely interdisciplinary of 3d polyhedral geometry and sculpture. Equal parts art, mathematics and engineering, the program has produced one of the most interesting collection of alumnae I've ever seen. You quickly learn that in order to build anything stable you have to use triangulated structures like tetrahedra.
Geodesic domes are strong, light, easy to assemble and require only a few distinct shapes.
Unfortunately, the nearly parallel bands of creases across the surface of a geomesic dome tend to interfere with the waves being received. A more randomly constructed dome would not have that problem, but would be much harder to build and require manufacturing many more different shapes. The complexity of assembly and number of distinct shapes stayed the same, but the added irregularity cleared up the reception problem. As a lover of polyhedra, I've always been fond of the jitterbug transformation, but never suspected that it had a practical application. To learn more about Buckminster Fuller's Geometry, check out the Design Science Consortium , which was started by the same people that for many years ran the Buckminster Fuller Institute.