IN THE SUMMER of 1972, Life magazine sent a photojournalist across the United States to document the newest housing boom. From New York to California, John Dominis photographed geodesic domes, showing the creative ways people adapted to “living in the round.” The photographs were featured in an eight-page spread, accompanied by an article noting that “domes and domelike structures of all shapes, sizes and materials are popping up on the landscape like mushrooms after a rain.”
Of all the many examples, the one most prominently featured belonged to a California builder named Lloyd Kahn, who’d made it by hand in the hippie town of Bolinas. “In an ordinary square house, vitality just sits down and dies in the corners,” he told Life. His dome was edgeless—a single large room built of recycled wood with an expanse of Plexiglas looking out on forest—enlightened living through architecture. So that everyone could live as he did, he’d authored two books, bestselling guides that translated Buckminster Fuller’s industrial engineering into do-it-yourself shelter for the people.
Kahn was one of Fuller’s most ardent followers. Trained in old-fashioned big-timber building, he’d been converted to geodesics in 1967, when he heard Fuller lecture at the Eslan Institute in Big Sur. He was persuaded by the ecological advantages of lightweight construction, enthralled by Fuller’s idea that waste could be eliminated by design. As he later wrote to Fuller, he began making dome homes with “the Design Science Revolution foremost in mind.” He published his Domebooks in part to increase the number of hands-on revolutionaries, but also (as he noted in Domebook 1), to inspire a broad range of “prototypes for future industrial production of low-cost housing.”
Toward that end, Kahn frequently experimented with materials. Constructing the buildings for an alternative Northern California boarding school, he made panels of sheet metal, fiberglass, ferrocement, vinyl, and polyurethane foam. The domes were built with students, on a budget of just $1,200 apiece, and erected in just a few months to beat the winter rains. Even more than Kahn’s Bolinas retreat, they embodied the potential of geodesic domes as accessible and affordable shelter. Within a couple of years, they also embodied the problems.
The structures expanded and contracted as temperatures changed. Given the complex geodesic geometry, and the need to cover each facet with a separate panel, the buildings started leaking all over the place. Exacerbating the problem, the most appealingly lightweight materials—such as fiberglass and vinyl—deteriorated in sunlight.
Observing the damage, Kahn began to reconsider the merits of geodesic shelter. By late 1972, he had stopped printing Domebook 2, and had written a rambling renunciation. “Metaphorically, our work on domes now appears to us to have been smart: mathematics, computers, new materials, plastics,” he wrote in Smart But Not Wise. “Yet reevaluation of our actual building experiments, publications, and feedback from others leads us to emphasize that there continue to be many unsolved problems with dome homes. … We now realize that there will be no wondrous new solution to housing, that our work, though perhaps smart, was by no means wise.” Kahn clearly felt betrayed, and he responded by vigorously challenging “the assumption, encouraged for a time in my mind by Bucky Fuller, that we will have to depend upon new technologies, new materials, new designs to solve the housing crisis on an overpopulated earth.” He proclaimed that plastics were poisonous, that producing them was environmentally reckless, and that the industry that made them belonged to Richard Nixon. Just months after Life presented him as the man bringing domes to the masses, Kahn recast himself as an advocate of all that Fuller rejected. “In the past year, we have discovered that there is far more to learn from wisdom of the past: from structures shaped by imagination, not mathematics, and built of materials appearing naturally on the earth, than from any further extension of whiteman technoplastic prowess.”
Even after Fuller’s death, Kahn continued to denounce his former hero. “Mamas, don’t let your mathematicians grow up to be builders,” he warned in a 1989 manifesto titled Refried Domes, and in a 2012 BoingBoing interview he groused about “problems with Buckminster Fuller’s ideas,” asserting that “they weren’t really the kind of ideas that I was in favor of.” Over that span of thirty years, he’d become one of the foremost advocates of indigenous architecture, documenting the construction of yurts and mud houses, log cabins and thatched cottages, all of which utilized local materials to meet the needs of life in their environs. He claimed that these vernacular designs were more practical and ecologically sound than plastic-paneled domes, a point that would be hard to dispute were one to compare the thatched cottages in an Irish village to a geodesic boarding school in the Santa Cruz mountains.
Kahn was right to question Fuller’s hype. Geodesic domes are not universally appropriate. (In most cases they’re about as suitable for housing as a log cabin on the Mongolian steppe.)1 However, the geodesic dome was just one end product of Fuller’s design science revolution. Geodesic construction was an example of design science, not its underlying principle. What mattered was the effort to design holistically for the greater good of Spaceship Earth. Ultimately the geodesic dome was as dispensable as the Dymaxion car or the Wichita House.
Lloyd Kahn’s polemics miss this essential point. Building geodesic structures didn’t make Kahn a comprehensive anticipatory design scientist, and identifying the problems with domes didn’t threaten design science as a whole, nor did it imply that all good ideas come from the pre-industrial past. Kahn’s connection to Fuller, both positive and negative, was totally superficial.
In that respect, Kahn is typical of Fuller’s followers, which says something about them and still more about Fuller himself. For all his talk of guinea-pig openness, he didn’t really tolerate dissent. Though he frequently contradicted himself or changed course, at any given moment he was so totally convinced of his worldview—from first principles to minor details—that alternatives were meaningless. From Black Mountain workshops to World Game seminars, Fuller always lectured and never argued, leaving little space in his life for anyone but unquestioning acolytes. These intellectual shadow puppets came and went, contributing nothing to his design science revolution other than the appearance of a movement.
And then he was dead. That made him easier to venerate or vilify or forget. His personal legacy has proved perfectly adequate for his cult of personality, and his artifacts have become retro-futurist baubles for a new generation of designers to ogle. At their best, his inventions provide points of origin for contemporary innovation, as they have done in the preceding six chapters. But what about the legacy that matters most? What about the legacy of comprehensive anticipatory design science?
NOT ALL OF Buckminster Fuller’s admirers were acolytes. Some, such as Frank Lloyd Wright and Arthur C. Clarke, simply appreciated the radical thinking of a kindred spirit. Far rarer were the independently articulating friends who shared Fuller’s commitment to comprehensively solving the world’s great problems, but without following his methods or condoning his solutions.
“Independently articulating” was Fuller’s description of his friendship with Victor Papanek, as he characterized it in his introduction to Papanek’s seminal Design for the Real World. “There are wonderful friendships which endure both despite and because of the fact that the individuals differ greatly in their experiential viewpoints while each admires the integrity which motivates the other,” Fuller wrote. “Such friendships often are built on mutual reaction to the same social inequalities and inefficiencies. However, having widely differing backgrounds, they often differ in their spontaneously conceived problem-solution strategies. Victor Papanek and I are two such independently articulating friends who are non-competitive and vigorously cooperative.”2
Papanek’s background had more in common with Lloyd Kahn’s than with Buckminster Fuller’s, at least in terms of his interest in other cultures. Papanek and Kahn were both explorers, traveling the world to observe the lives of people living independently of “whiteman technoplastic prowess.”3 However, unlike Kahn, Papanek had the formal training of a designer, and the conviction that—as he wrote in Design for the Real World—“design must become an innovative, highly creative, cross-disciplinary tool responsive to the true needs of men.”4 Repudiating Fulleresque techno-utopianism, Papanek was deeply disturbed by the environmental damage wrought by designers in the twentieth century. (He believed that “industrial design has put murder on a mass-production basis.”) But he claimed that was because designers had failed to develop their world-changing capacity; they didn’t use their power responsibly. The design profession was focused too much on designing alluring products and not enough on “the social and political environment in which design takes place.”
Papanek’s travels took him everywhere from Alaska to Indonesia, and each cultural encounter expanded his conception of design. He wasn’t especially concerned with documenting artifacts or craftsmanship, and he certainly had no intention of cataloguing pre-industrial material culture for wholesale imitation by post-industrial back-to-the-landers. What he picked up was more fundamental. Living in an Eskimo village, for instance, he learned an alternative way of perceiving space—aural rather than visual—which helped locals to navigate flat Alaskan tundra. “Nonlinear, aural space perception imposes fewer vertical and horizontal limitations on the Eskimos’ world-view,” he observed in Design for the Real World. His Eskimo acquaintances seemed to be completely indifferent to visual orientation. Their homes were often decorated with magazine pictures hung sideways. They could read upside-down. For Papanek, the insight was not that magazine design should be more eclectic—as a literalist like Kahn might conclude—but rather that designers should rigorously assess the cultural blocks limiting their perception of problems and solutions.5 (One example reminiscent of Fuller’s Dymaxion bathroom: Overcoming the Western fecal taboo, Papanek proposed to decrease pollution and energy consumption by converting human excrement to fuel.)
To fix the world’s ills, Papanek did all he could to make design thinking global. Yet he was equally emphatic that thoughtful design was specific to a place and people. There was no cosmic Dymaxion widget that would make mankind a universal success. Global design thinking had to be grounded in local conditions.
That was another motivation for Papanek’s travels. In 1960s Indonesia, for instance, he found villages so isolated that people had no access to outside information. Since the people were illiterate, he realized that any communication would have to be verbal, and the only practical way to communicate verbally would be by radio. For radio, there had to be electricity. That wouldn’t have phased Buckminster Fuller, who’d most likely have presented the Indonesian government with his master plan for a world energy grid.6 Papanek had a rather different reaction. For millennia, people in Southeast Asia had burned dried dung for heat. The warmth, he determined, was sufficient to produce minimal voltage across a thermocouple, a simple device made by connecting two wires of different metals. If the radio was reduced to a coil, an earplug, and a few other basic components, the thermocouple would provide sufficient power to pick up any signal in the region. The radio would have none of the refinements an American consumer might expect. There wouldn’t even be a tuner. But with only one signal likely to reach Indonesian villages at any given time, tuning wouldn’t matter. What was important for Papanek was that the radio could be made by local untrained labor at a cost of nine cents per unit and—housed in a used tin can—could be locally maintained for decades.
Papanek was castigated by colleagues for designing something so ugly; his prototype used an upside-down juice can bristling with bare wires. Ugliness was a professional taboo. Couldn’t he at least apply a coat of paint? Papanek countered that the purpose of his invention was to let villagers affordably access information. Those were the pertinent design criteria—reflecting the social and political environment—and in any case he had no right “to make aesthetic or ‘good taste’ decisions that will affect millions of people in Indonesia.” The plainness invited them to make the radios their own, which they did by embellishing the cans with bits of glass and shell. “This is a new way of making design both more participatory and more responsive,” he proclaimed in Design for the Real World.
That was an overstatement—both grandiose and patronizing—but at least it was a beginning. Over the following decades, Papanek increasingly backed away from the role of designing artifacts for others, preferring to play the part of mediator. Sharing his training and experience, he could bring the benefits of global design thinking to any group anywhere in the world. He could support their process of defining and addressing local problems as only they could do for themselves, and after he left, their designs could continue evolving independently of him.
On the surface, Papanek’s mediation was the opposite of Dymaxion universalism. Yet Fuller himself recognized that he and Papanek shared a core belief that aligned their efforts to improve the human condition. “Victor Papanek speaks about everything as design,” he approvingly wrote in his introduction to Design for the Real World. In his final chapter, Papanek elaborated on this theme, using language that deliberately echoed Fuller’s terminology. “Design [is] the primary, underlying matrix of life,” he wrote. “Integrated design is comprehensive: it attempts to take into consideration all the factors and modulations necessary to a decision-making process. Integrated, comprehensive design is anticipatory. It attempts to see trends-as-a-whole and continuously to extrapolate from established data and interpolate from the scenarios of the future which it constructs.”
In other words, Papanek practiced comprehensive anticipatory design science. He was as legitimately a comprehensive anticipatory design scientist as Buckminster Fuller. The design science revolution could—and did—have more than one protagonist. There has been—and remains—more than one mode of implementation.7 And this is more than just a historical detail. Arguing that every designer should become a polyglot, Papanek asserted that “the structure of languages gives us ways of dealing with and experiencing realities, each discreetly different in each language.” The same can be said for the distinct design languages of Fuller and Papanek. Knowing more than one expression of design science fosters independent articulation.
IN JANUARY 2014, Google acquired Nest Labs for $3.2 billion. The four-year-old company manufactured just two products, updated versions of humdrum home appliances: the smoke detector and the thermostat. The Nest devices were undeniably stylish. The thermostat was awarded a gold medal by the Industrial Designers Society of America, and was added to the permanent collection of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. But these were not the principal reasons for Google’s multibillion dollar purchase. The Nest gadgets abetted Google’s effort to make every house a smart home—a seamless physical extension of the Internet.
A Nest thermostat learns inhabitants’ preferences and habits by analyzing behavioral patterns, automatically controlling heat and air conditioning for an optimal climate. For example, the heater might power down during work hours, turning on as people head home. A smartphone app provides remote control in case of an unexpected visit. And the thermostat interfaces with the Nest smoke detector, disconnecting heating appliances if there’s carbon monoxide in the air.
The interaction between devices, and interactivity with inhabitants, are the bases for Google’s excitement. Nest is a model for enriching all home appliances with machine learning, networking them, and connecting them to the cloud, where Google can provide an online platform for total home optimization.
Google is also working to optimize transportation. Alluring for their hands-off convenience, driverless cars may eventually be coordinated as efficiently as web traffic. A computerized car can learn passengers’ habits and preferences—not unlike Nest’s thermostat—and can interface with other vehicles for a smoother commute. Sharing the same platform as smart homes will improve the performance of both, and both can be further enhanced with wearable computing: The smart home and driverless car belong to the same seamlessly augmented reality as Google Glass.
Is Google the future of comprehensive anticipatory design science? Without question, the company has anticipated a future more comprehensively designed than Buckminster Fuller ever imagined, and is scientifically developing every component to be globally implemented.
The environmental benefits could be dramatic. Nest claims to lower heating and cooling bills by 20 percent since appliances run only when required, and energy companies offer rebates because the thermostat makes power consumption more consistent. A Google platform for the entire home in every home on the planet would vastly increase efficiency, and total integration with a smart grid would stabilize energy demands, facilitating conversion to renewables such as solar and wind. The advantages of eliminating traffic are even more obvious: Lower energy usage and less pollution—especially if the cars run on hydrogen—not to mention the public health benefits of diminished stress and fewer collisions.
The technocratic Buckminster Fuller would surely have approved. He was eager to cede control of world affairs to computers, the ultimate goal of his world game. Nor did privacy issues concern him, as he made clear when he lobbied for an omniscient geoscope. Fuller’s comprehensivism called for big solutions to big problems. His proposed dome over Manhattan had all the daring and whimsy of a Google moonshot. He was as comfortable with military funding and as manic for patents as any venture capitalist. He placed great faith in corporations, venerating Henry Ford and collaborating with Kaiser Aluminum.
And if Google somehow didn’t appeal to him, the twenty-first century offers many more options for a corporate design science revolution. “In this connected age, no company can stay bound to ‘I’m just going to make this one piece of the puzzle,’ ” Nest CEO Tony Fadell told Fast Company shortly after selling out to Google. He mentioned Samsung, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft as competitors to control our technological future. Any of them could engineer an ultra-efficient infrastructure. But is this the version of comprehensive anticipatory design science we should buy?
As Victor Papanek showed, there’s more than one way of conceiving a design science revolution. The version that connected him to Fuller certainly wasn’t the vision driving Google and Samsung. To begin with, Papanek was adamantly opposed to patents. More deeply, the simplistic equation of anticipatory comprehensivism with technological efficiency ignores the social and political environment in which design takes place. Corporations are not environmental stewards or humanitarian organizations. They may underwrite environmental or humanitarian initiatives for marketing purposes, top managers may be genuinely philanthropic, and profitable business practices may bring benefits to the public, as Google has done with web search. However, the purpose of a corporation is to compound shareholder investment. That is what every company is designed to do. Corporate comprehensivism is inherently monopolistic. Any anticipatory activity is inherently predatory. Corporations are not inherently good or evil; they’re inherently corporate. The comprehensiveness of their vision is limited by the framework of capitalist competition.
What makes Fuller so endlessly compelling is his Dymaxion inconsistency. He was both corporate and anti-establishment, and more concerned with making the world work than with resolving his internal contradictions. The future of design science depends on Fulleresque pragmatism. It will require corporate innovations, given the ubiquity of corporations, yet corporate ubiquity must simultaneously be resisted in order to maintain the integrity of design science in its own right. Design science revolutionaries must critically consider all paths to world-around comprehensiveness, lest we reduce doing more with less to back-to-the-land fantasy or bottom-line efficiency.
SO HOW DO you foment a revolution? How do you make the world work for 100 percent of humanity, in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation, without ecological offense or disadvantage to anyone? How do you become a comprehensive anticipatory design scientist? Reconsider what Buckminster Fuller sought, with an independence befitting Victor Papanek.
With more than 3.5 billion years of evolution, nature is the world’s most experienced problem-solver. It’s also the most comprehensive, since all life shares the same biochemistry, every species interacts with all others through natural selection, and all of life collectively comprises a single biosphere. Yet every organism is independent, each species autonomous. There are myriad adaptations to innumerable niches on a planet that is anything but homogenous. Life is striking for both its variety and its cohesiveness. Together, these qualities have made life versatile enough to flourish in deserts and tropics and deep-sea vents, and have rendered life resilient enough to survive massive asteroid strikes.
The attentive designer draws on both of life’s strengths—variety and cohesiveness—when confronting a problem. The comprehensive anticipatory design scientist integrates them with such deftness that the solution seems practically to be alive in its own right.
Variety is the easier of these traits to take up, which is why it’s more typically enlisted. Life can be viewed as a vast catalogue of solutions to problems posed by the world we live in. Mobility is an example, and fish and birds have both evolved ingenious modes of transit. These are appropriated in traditional biomimesis. The result is a Bionic or Dymaxion car—or George Cayley’s nineteenth-century airships.
Cohesiveness is approached by observing living interactions. Life can be seen in terms of networks such as food webs, or can be viewed even more abstractly in terms of nitrogen, methane, and carbon cycles. Cohesive design begins by considering how species relate to each other, and then applies these relationships in human society. To an extent, this is the approach Buckminster Fuller took up when he envisioned zoomobiles providing humans the freedom of wild ducks. Ostensibly learning from waterfowl, he was proposing seasonal human nesting as an alternative to fixed urban planning, regional identities, and national animosities.
To combine cohesiveness with variety requires that the design scientist consider network and nodes simultaneously, the interrelationships and individual adaptations of all species within a niche. Or at the very least, it requires the design of a system in which cohesiveness and variety can coevolve, where there are enough rules for the former and there is enough flexibility for the latter. The World Wide Web is the closest that humanity has come to this ideal—and it’s no coincidence that the Web seems more alive than any other human invention. The challenge for future comprehensive anticipatory design scientists will be to reach beyond the Web, an accidental breakthrough that, for all its comprehensiveness, certainly was not anticipated to become what it is today.8
The cohesiveness and variety of nature can prepare ambitious comprehensive anticipatory design scientists to reinvent deeply troubled human ecosystems such as banking and international relations. The designer should seek to redefine individual roles by drawing inspiration from the variety of life, and seek to redefine relationships by drawing inspiration from living systems.9 Our knowledge of biology is extensive and is growing exponentially. What we need is comprehensive anticipatory biomimesis.
The first machine for living was the cell membrane. In order for life to evolve, oceans of self-replicating nucleic acid needed to be portioned into living units isolated by containers of lipid. These packages of RNA could compete, and the most successful could replicate. Natural selection could get started.
Over time, the membranes became complex, efficiently absorbing nutrients and excreting waste. In some cases (such as amoebae), cytoskeletons provided mobility. In others (such as nematodes and chimpanzees), the membrane mediated intercellular communication and collaboration, the basis for multicellular organisms. Some of those organisms (such as the donkey) powered the first human machines. Those human machines (such as the plow) powered civilization, facilitating organization into towns and cities. Is it any wonder that a machine-driven society should be intent on reconceiving the home as a machine for living?
Buckminster Fuller’s forays into housing were cellular in many respects. His Dymaxion houses were complex membranes to contain the American nuclear family. Modular units, frequently mobile, they were selectively permeable protective coverings that could be replicated in quantity. There’s no good reason to believe that they were deliberately biomimetic. Their relationship to comprehensive anticipatory design science, rather, is that, like cells, they were adapted to living. They were not designed to show off wealth or to appear homey. An essential starting point for comprehensive anticipatory design science is to clearly identify the problem and to develop a solution that addresses that problem as appropriately as possible. Natural selection imposes that pressure on life. Fuller attempted to impose it on himself.
Yet, for all their comprehensiveness, Fuller’s homes were not sufficiently anticipatory. Such is also the case with an amoeba, which is exquisitely evolved for the present, not for the future. In his homes, Fuller sought amoeba-like perfection, and his Wichita House came close to achieving it before changing housing conditions rendered his invention obsolete. His particular amoeba could not survive. However, amoebae in general—and life in general—are anticipatory, because adaptations are transitory. Their ability to evolve is the anticipatory aspect of their design.10 The comprehensive anticipatory design scientist must be attentive to changing conditions: Change is certain to happen. Equally certain, the specific changes are unpredictable. The designer must therefore also be a metadesigner, designing for adaptability, even at the expense of flawlessness.
Education is specialization. Such has always been the case, and often with reason. Apprenticeship prepares the blacksmith to practice his perilous craft. Through military training, cadets become infantrymen, interchangeable in death. A PhD in particle physics or neuroscience requires at least a decade of focused study, culminating in further specialization after the doctorate is awarded. Even the apparent exceptions to specialized education don’t look so exceptional on re-examination. The arts drill students in theory, and the humanities specialize students in the liberal arts canon.
Undoubtedly our knowledge of the world has increased with specialization, as has our ability to alter our surroundings. Any solar physicist knows more about the sun than Galileo did, and any hydrologist can move water more effectively than Archimedes could. Specialization has facilitated this knowledge gain since the specialist is specially positioned to leverage past research. But more knowledge mandates more specialization. It’s a positive feedback loop that Buckminster Fuller recognized could have a negative impact on society because people would be conditioned by their specialty. Our scientifically informed technological world is spectacularly complex. Specialists cannot comprehensively study the world’s problems, and cannot anticipate the impact of their solutions outside their own specialty. In that respect, specialized training is anathema to comprehensive anticipatory design science. The comprehensive anticipatory design scientist specializes in convergences.
Fuller was an autodidact whose self-education was guided by his naive curiosity. The initial impetus for his two-way TV was to provide an open resource for unstructured autodidactic study. It was both a brainteaser and a mental prosthesis: a brainteaser because new ideas might emerge from the chance meeting of disparate information in a curious mind, and a mental prosthesis because it could deliver specialized knowledge on demand.
Resources far more vast than Fuller ever imagined are now available to anyone with an Internet connection. The English-language Wikipedia alone includes nearly five million articles, enough to sustain a quarter century of nonstop reading—which would be pointless since Wikipedia is always changing. Information is increasingly pervasive and increasingly unstable.
Any dedicated comprehensive anticipatory design scientist will periodically indulge in open-ended inquiry—serendipitously connecting mutually informative bodies of knowledge—and almost everybody uses Google as a mental prosthesis from time to time. But the amount of information in need of mental remixing far exceeds the amount of available mental space. There are not nearly enough comprehensive anticipatory design scientists to process the products of specialization. Equally important, autodidactic dilettantism is denigrated in our society of specialization. The solutions generated through comprehensive anticipatory design science are unlikely to attract the widespread support needed for comprehensive enactment.
Education is therefore an essential aspect of comprehensive anticipatory design science, not only in terms of committed design scientists’ eclectic self-education, but also in terms of design science infiltrating the educational system, providing an alternative to specialized learning.11 Everyone must be exposed to design science for design science to have the raw material and the influence to make a difference. The design scientist must be an educator as much as an innovator.
Three hundred million years ago, Earth was a single landmass surrounded by ocean. The notion that the continents were once joined was first suggested by their matching contours, which implied to some nineteenth-century observers that the world was a colossal jigsaw puzzle cast asunder. In 1912, the German meteorologist Alfred Wegener organized the evidence into a theory, which he dubbed “continental drift.” Geologists rejected it for the next fifty years, arguing that no earthly force could move continents such great distances.
Their skepticism was understandable. The drifting of continents—now universally accepted as plate tectonics—is far too gradual for humans to perceive. The same is true for other highly significant phenomena. When Charles Darwin first proposed natural selection, he faced at least as much resistance as Wegener; although his theory explained myriad observations, nobody had actually seen finches evolving. Likewise, the effects of our own collective activity—such as climate change and loss of biodiversity—are almost invisible to us, because the impact spans the whole planet, growing over centuries. Like plate tectonics and evolution, the arrival of the Anthropocene epoch is not a human-scale phenomenon.
Buckminster Fuller conceived the Geoscope as a tool to help humans attain a global perspective, to see worldwide events and to probe geological time. It was to be an instrument for scoping Earth’s patterns—an instrument of comprehensive anticipatory design science. And though it was never built adjacent to the United Nations, he always carried one in his head.
In order to anticipate comprehensively, the present-day design scientist must do as he did. Design scientists must be sensitive to natural patterns of change and human patterns of activity, extrapolating from fragmentary evidence. In the Anthropocene, these patterns will be interrelated. And since human activity is the driving force, they not only can be observed but also can be impacted.
However, patterns must be detected before they become settled, before the consequences are foregone conclusions. Unlike Wegener and Darwin, the design scientist cannot be passive.
There are now countless tools for scoping the planet. Microelectronic sensors are nearly ubiquitous, the Internet has made abundant data easy to access, and powerful computers and data visualization tools have given most everybody the ability to search for meaningful correlations. All that’s required is curiosity and diligence.
To act on found patterns is more challenging. Global changes are too vast for any comprehensive anticipatory design scientist to make alone. For that reason, the design scientist must concentrate equally on communicating the patterns detected through design science, in order to encourage the global populace to re-pattern constructively.12
The comprehensive anticipatory design scientist is not only a designer of global systems, but also of global opinion. Both jobs are served by visualizing patterns.
Every engineer esteems efficiency, the only universal value in engineering. The CPU of a computer, the engine in a car, and the plumbing for a city are all designed to be efficient. Yet efficiency is not a design specification in its own right. It must be specified in terms of function, and most engineered systems have many conflicting desiderata. The engineer seeks to optimize competing criteria—such as balancing the demands for high speed and low power consumption in a microprocessor.
Buckminster Fuller always optimized inventions in conventional engineering terms. His goal of “doing the most with the least”—a good definition of efficiency—was subsumed by functional considerations when he ceased lecturing and started building. For example, the geodesic domes designed for trade fairs balance weight of shipment against speed of assembly, considerations that certainly didn’t inform the design of his proposed Dome over Manhattan.
But Fuller also considered efficiency in another way, which is rare in engineering and essential to comprehensive anticipatory design science. If conventional efficiency is horizontal—optimizing all the design requirements of a building or machine—design science also seeks vertical efficiency: The artifact must be efficient not only for the maker, but also for society.
The comprehensive anticipatory design scientist has two sets of design specs that must intersect. A car engine must be designed to serve both the vehicle and the world as a whole; the optimal power source for automotive performance may be suboptimal for the performance of Spaceship Earth. While design science has already made inroads with high-performance electric cars such as the Tesla Roadster, comprehensive problem-solving requires that the designer ask whether vehicles should even be personal.
With so many criteria to balance—more than can ever realistically be enumerated—the comprehensive anticipatory design scientist risks never getting started, or reaching a solution so outlandish that society will never accept it. Both of these problems plagued the Manhattan Dome and many more of Fuller’s most grandiose plans. But he was also practical. Domes got built, and some were impressively efficient on impressively many levels, even if they were imperfect.
No optimum is absolute. That is why pragmatism is also a desideratum of comprehensive anticipatory design science.13 If a solution isn’t implemented, it can never be efficient.
According to some accounts, the last person to have read everything was Immanuel Kant. Other historians attribute the achievement to John Milton or Erasmus of Rotterdam. But even if we attribute the achievement to the most recent claimant—Samuel Taylor Coleridge—universal knowledge was a thing of the past even when Buckminster Fuller was born in 1895. Comprehensivism simply isn’t possible within a given head.
The eclecticism of an autodidactic education is one response to this problem. Guided by curiosity, serendipity can be a powerful mode of discovery. Every comprehensive anticipatory design scientist must learn in this way—at least as a supplement to formal education—just as every design scientist must master biomimesis, adaptability, patterning, and efficiency. But although all of these qualities are necessary for the comprehensive anticipatory design scientist, they are not sufficient for comprehensive anticipatory design science. Comprehensiveness must be collective.
Introducing comprehensivism into schools will help, as will the development of tools for widespread visualization of comprehensive patterns. However, the most important future development in comprehensive anticipatory design science will be the creation of new platforms for global interaction. All knowledge comes together when all minds come together. Given the right impetus, those minds might even envision a collective future.
Fuller conceived his World Game for just this purpose, recognizing that the free play of games might provide a framework for everyone to win. Even if his comprehension of game mechanics was weak, his intuition was right that games could bring humanity as close as humanly possible to the numinous universal optimum. Online games can fulfill and expand upon his vision.14
Design scientists can make these games using the design principles outlined here, though they’ll be out of work if they succeed: The world gaming platform itself will be the ultimate comprehensive anticipatory design scientist. We should all be so fortunate.
WHEN CIVIL WAR struck Rwanda in 1990, the United Nations supplied metal bars and plastic tarp as materials for refugee shelters. But it didn’t work out as expected. The metal was sold on the black market, and trees were chopped down to replace it, exacerbating wartime deforestation. For reasons nobody expected, the humanitarian aid was counterproductive.
Reading about the debacle, a young Japanese architect named Shigeru Ban proposed an alternative. Ban had been experimenting with cardboard tubes as a cheap material for temporary exhibits, and had found them to be remarkably strong and resilient. Since paper was less precious than metal, he reasoned that cardboard refugee shelters would be more economical—and less vulnerable to black market graft—than the standard UN shelters.
Following successful deployment in Rwanda, Ban’s cardboard houses have been erected in disaster areas worldwide, from Kobe to Port-au-Prince to New Orleans. Ban has supplemented family dwellings with community centers and even a cardboard cathedral in Christchurch, New Zealand. With each catastrophe, he has further developed the structural potential of paper architecture. He has added strength by making walls curvy, and durability by adding waterproof coatings. He has exploited paper’s translucency for natural light and personal privacy. His ingenuity has been recognized with museum exhibits and a Pritzker Prize. Yet Ban has not commercialized his cardboard architecture, nor has he proposed it as the future of building. On the contrary, he has continued making homes for private clients using more conventional materials.15 “I like paper, but it’s not the only material I use,” he said in a 2013 Japan Times interview. “I use wood and steel and concrete too. The important thing is that the material must match the function.”
Ban’s paper architecture matches its function in myriad ways. As he surmised in Rwanda, cardboard is valuable in crises precisely because it has so little commercial value. Cardboard houses can be affordably erected and aren’t worth stealing. Also cardboard is light enough to transport anywhere and to assemble by hand. And while the houses are strong, the fully recyclable materials psychologically suggest that refugee status is temporary, meaning that refugee camps are more likely to be accepted by neighboring communities, and refugees are less likely to be encamped permanently.
In other words, Ban’s refugee shelters exemplify comprehensive anticipatory design science. Their design is comprehensive because they are completely adapted to their intended purpose, taking into account the physical needs of refugees, the resources of humanitarian organizations, and the sociopolitical reality of encampment. They are anticipatory because they are optimally designed for their entire life cycle, functioning physically, psychologically, and sociopolitically beyond the initial emergency. Their sturdiness anticipates the travails of refugee life, and their ephemerality anticipates refugees’ reintegration into society.
Moreover, the shelters are comprehensively anticipatory in more global terms, because the kinds of emergencies they have served in the past are likely to grow more urgent in the future. Climate change is wreaking ever greater environmental havoc. Natural disasters such as hurricanes are becoming more frequent. Equally perilous, unpredictable weather undermines farming, and scarcity of food undermines social stability. Catastrophe, famine, and warfare: These are the future conditions anticipated by Shigeru Ban’s architecture. Addressing them with grace, his buildings make the immediate future endurable, giving society time for deeper amends.
Shigeru Ban often cites Buckminster Fuller as an influence on his work, though clearly Ban’s vision differs considerably from that of Fuller (as well as Papanek and Google), and from the independent articulations suggested in these pages. His cardboard architecture is inspiring as evidence of what comprehensive anticipatory design science can achieve today when practiced creatively.
Comprehensive design benefits from profusion and variety, a truth Fuller recognized when he referred to himself as a random element. More comprehensive anticipatory design scientists are always needed. The obligation falls on everyone who belongs to the universe.
1. That said, yurts and mud huts are hardly appropriate in a city. While Kahn should be commended for leveraging past wisdom, past wisdom is all but useless for compact urban living.
2. Papanek returned the complement in his book, expressing his admiration for “men like Buckminster Fuller who spend 100 percent of their time designing for the needs of man.” He also kept a Dymaxion world map in his office.
3. Fuller traveled many more miles than both of them put together, but it was never in the spirit of discovery, always to proselytize.
4. As a young refugee from prewar Vienna, Papanek apprenticed with Frank Lloyd Wright and studied at Cooper Union and MIT.
5. Papanek looked at world cultures much as Fuller viewed the cosmos. His anthropology was as unreliable but as personally enriching as Fuller’s cosmology.
6. And the grid would be sufficient to power his two-way TV, conveniently sheltered from the monsoons by placing Indonesia under a geodesic dome.
7. Yet another approach can be found in the contemporaneous architecture of Paolo Soleri, whose densely layered city plans were based on the “logistical perfection” of living organisms. Fuller deemed Soleri “one of the greatest of the dreaming strategists.”
8. In the beginning, the web linked elite scientific institutions, using protocols initially developed for military communication.
9. Consider the potential of resource cycling, discussed at the end of Chapter 1.
10. Consider the idea of self-generating houses, proposed in the final section of Chapter 2.
11. Potential approaches to open-ended education are discussed at the end of Chapter 3.
12. Consider the potential of local geoscopes, as proposed at the end of Chapter 4.
13. A pragmatic alternative to the Manhattan Dome is suggested at the end of Chapter 5.
14. See the final section of Chapter 6 for more details.
15. Ban’s residential and commercial commissions, always expensive and often lavish, support his pro bono humanitarian architectural practice.