1 Introduction
2 We now have aboard our Spaceship Earth more than ample capability to take care of all humanity for all generations to come and to do so at higher standards of living and individual freedom than any humans have thus far experienced or even dreamed of, while in no way endangering the ecological integrity of our planet.... It is also incontrovertibly demonstrable that it is feasible to accomplish this ... within ten years while concurrently phasing out all further human use of fossil fuels and atomic energy. We can live handsomely on our annual energy income from the sun and the many modes of its impoundment.... It can only be accomplished by a design revolution which produces so much higher technical performance per each unit of resource invested as to take care of all human needs.
3 R. Buckminster Fuller, Education Automation [1977], pp.17273.1
4 1 as Buckys work often germinated for many years before finding its way into a bound volume, the years given in brackets refer to the year in which the quoted material was originally drafted and /or published rather than the books publication date. Page numbers are from Lars Müller Editions 2008/2010
5 I think we have a very brief window of opportunity to deal with climate change ... no longer
than a decade, at the most.
James Hansen, Director, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies; and Adjunct
Professor, Earth and Environmental Sciences, Columbia University, in September 2006.
6 In 1961, my grandfather Buckminster Fuller made a presentation to the biennial World Congress of the international union of architects (Union Internationale des Architectes, or UIA) in London to call for the launch of a World Design Science Decade that would engage architects, architectural schools, and students in a ten-year program to re-design key elements of the world life-support systems, thereby increasing their operating efficiency from 4 to 12 percent, and thus lifting the high standard of living enjoyed by 44 percent of humanity to 100 percent using known world resources2. His talk sounded a call that reverberated amongst the new generation of students and architects present there, showing up in the architectural journals, interviews, and letters between Bucky and many who would become his associates and partners in the burgeoning movement for a comprehensive design revolution.
7 2 Buckys calculation of standard of living derives from a 1952 analysis he made of world consumption of energy per capita and its relationship to standard of living in developed and undeveloped regions of the world. See R. Buckminster Fuller and John McHale, World Design Science Decade Document 1 (Carbondale, ill., 1963), p. 27.
8 And it echoed in the subsequent 1963 session of the UIA in Cuba. Bucky was precluded from going to Cuba for the meeting due to Cold War tensionsthough he attempted to persuade an acquaintance of his, undersecretary of State McGeorge Bundy, later National Security advisor to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, to allow him to attend by stressing the import of the initiative, it was to no avail. He ultimately presented his further proposal at an international symposium immediately following in Mexico City.
9 With students and architectural schools inspired around the world, he attempted to coordinate the implementation of a comprehensive game plan from his then recently established head quarters: the World Resources inventory at Southern Illinois University. Together with young artist and sociologist John McHale, who had just arrived from London to be his point person, they published a series of World Design Science Decade Documents which included essays and extensive visual mapping of world data, trends, and needs, touching on the big picture of every component of the planets infrastructure.
10 Revolution by design and invention is the only revolution tolerable to all men, all societies, and all political systems anywhere. Every nation welcomed the invention of the airplane, and refrigeration. Every nation welcomed and em- ployed the transistor.... All the world, properly informed of the significance of the ... design and invention revolution, will applaud and support the initiative.
11 Utopia or Oblivion [1965] p. 259.
12 While the impact of these events clearly inspired a new generation of design revolutionaries, and while the essays from the project showed up in many of Buckys books of the period, the ten-year project did not spawn the global movement aspired to. Though today we have at our fingertips the kind of computer capability and information technology that we have witnessed facilitate the transformation of powerful ideas into global movements, in 1963 students and architects, spread over the planet, were unable to connect except by traveling to other universities, by preparing work for presentation at periodic meetings, or by correspondence and postal submissions of research. And while Bucky and his team worked diligently to garner state funding for dedicated use of institutional mainframe computers to compile growing bodies of data on global resources, trends, and needs, it was never to materialize.
13 What makes the World Design Science Decade as proposed in 1963 so relevant today is that it may be one of the first drafts of a comprehensive plan for addressing the worlds problems and making the world work for 100% of humanity. With the portfolio of global crises getting bigger each yearnuclear weapons (seemingly ever less secure), systematic environmental destruction, climate change, chronic extreme poverty, failed states, and now this past year the global financial meltdownit becomes starkly evident that what is needed are solutions that are bold, innovative, and, more than anything else, comprehensive. They must be comprehensive in addressing both short-term and long-term needs, both immediate symptoms as well as root causes, and, most fundamentally, recognizing the interconnectedness of this web of systemic planetary problems. Solutions that attempt to solve certain problems without addressing the others will simply continue to fall short, for they are merely palliatives appearing to move things forward by sweeping messes under the rug that turn out to be someone elses blanketlike sending the waste downstream only to have it foul nearby beaches.
14 It becomes more and more obvious that we need an immediate and radical re-design of our planets life-support systems and infrastructure. And yet as powerful as all the networking tools now are, and as broad as the grassroots participation emerging around the planet is, it is clear that the actual implementation of the necessary changes will take many yearsa difficult cup of tea to s wallow within the quick-fix cultural zeitgeist.
15 At the same time, the urgency of the matters challenging us is inspiring people, networks, and organizations to action at every level of our society. And there are currently emerging new drafts of comprehensive plans for holistically solving the planetary predicamentLester Brown and the Earth Policy institutes remarkable PLAN B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization is an outstanding example of one that could not be more comprehensive and do-able with known technology and resources. another example is Amory Lovins and the Rocky Mountain institutes Winning the Oil Endgame: Innovation for Profits, Jobs, and Security. It is an in-depth, peer-reviewed, Pentagon co-funded, globally-applicable plan for getting the U.S. off of oil within twenty years in a way that revitalizes the very core of the economic engine that is failing. And Rob Hopkins The Transition Handbook: From Oil Dependency to Local Resilience has moved communities, now in the hundreds, around the world to bring comprehensive grassroots self-organized planning to the re-design of local communities. Undoubtedly there are many other fine examples, but, nevertheless, in the proliferation of new solutions to the vexing challenges facing society, comprehensive thinking and design are still all too rare.
16 How can we nurture this kind of thinking and these kinds of approaches at all levels of our society, on the front lines of our everyday lives? For it is not the comprehensive plans that give rise to comprehensive thinking , it is comprehensive problem-solving approaches that give rise to such brilliant strategies for addressing the urgent global challenges. So, what is the educational curriculum, what is the course of study? What are the fundamental principles that comprise, inform, and give rise to that kind of thinking? Where are the case studies, what are the rigorous practices of such generalized problem solving and where do we go to learn? Generalized because nature can serve up a wicked curveball and the challenges emerging all around us range from local to regional to national to global, from environment, to health, to food, to energy systems. What is the skill set that prepares someone to grapple with the matter of re-designing our global system to serve 100 percent of humanity ? What are the new paradigms that foster skillful means in this arena?
17 Bucky saw the answer to this need in the elevation of design to a disciplined science founded in awareness of the principles of natures design. He called this approach comprehensive anticipatory design science:
18 comprehensive because the critical global challenges are systemic;
19 anticipatory because it is much more efficient to prevent heart disease than to cure it; because it is much more cost effective to use water more efficiently than to dig new wells;
20 design because it is much easier to reform the environment by inventing and introducing new solutions, like building a bridge, than it is to reform other human beings behaviors, such as urging them to swim the rapids;
21 science, because we need to apply the best practices for establishing facts, gathering information, and identifying principles through experimentation.
22 So it was with this in mind that I embarked upon what has become a winter ritual, intensively reading Buckys books to select and prepare the next installment for re-publication. Mid-winter in full throttle I am in the middle of reading five of his books simultaneously. Almost like a horse race, I move back and forth between the volumes to see which one connects most deeply with me, and the concerns of our day. Buoyed along with the sense of possibility in the emergence of a new U.S. president, by the arrival on front and center stage of the notion of a green economy, by the broad public consensus to get off the use of fossil fuels, and by the dawning recognition that the problems facing our society are an integrated complex which will only be solved boldly and, with a new word seeming to be in vogue, comprehensively.
23 I keep coming back to Buckys vision of mobilizing young studentsnow networked globally, now easily accessing the global database of information provided by the internet, now able to ultra-coordinate with other such students via laptops or smartphones. I think of the great need, as much as any other, to educate and train this next generation of problem-solvers, who are coming up to speed and already joining the implementation. I keep thinking about the young people, or the young in sprit, who are saying, I want to be a sustainer or a greener, who see a career in creating a green economy, who want to develop in themselves the capacity to solve the challenging problems facing humanity. I keep sensing an explosion of people thinking I want to be an Amory Lovins, I want to be a Lester Brown, I want to be a Bucky Fullerwhen I grow up. Where can they go? I think too of the grown-ups being required to re-invent their careers and lifestyles, not to mention all the semi-retired individuals with the luxury of being able to re-invest more and more free time to engage in the pressing problems of our times.
24 It was the need to advance the field of comprehensive anticipatory design science and comprehensive design education in general that brought me to select Ideas and Integrities: A Spontaneous Autobiographical Disclosure and Education Automation: Comprehensive Learning for Emergent Humanity for this years publications.
25 As I re-read Ideas and Integrities, I found myself continuing to feel it was perhaps the first textbook of design scienceproviding the curriculum that must proliferate and be offered for undergraduate and graduate level programs in design science. It hit me as an under-the-hood immersion in the mechanics of the Bucky Fuller-mobile for those who want to know exactly how it works : the principles, the design strategies, the engineering, and its development.
26 The specialist in comprehensive design is an emerging synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic,
objective economist and evolutionary strategist.
Ideas and Integrities [1950] pp. 23233.
27 Though Ideas and Integrities: A Spontaneous Autobiographical Disclosure is chock full of raw, hardcore, mind-stretching context and language, rather than being a technical book it may be one of Buckys most intimate. The subtitle sets the stage, underscored in his background note for chapter 5, I Figure, calling the volume a biography of my thought development. The three opening essays include some of his most elegant and accessible self-reflections: Influences on My Work, Later Development of My Work, and Margaret Fullers Prophecy, an excerpt of the writing of his great aunt Margaret Fuller who had moved him deeply upon his discovery of her in the early years of his re-thinking. The other sixteen essays reveal his own evolution, spanning the period from 1942, as he came into his own as a teacher at design schools during the late forties, and his own great explosion onto the world stage in the fifties and early sixties after the invention of the geodesic domes.
28 Education Automation picks up where Ideas and Integrities leaves off. The opening essay Education Automation: Freeing the Scholar to Return to his Studies, originally published in 1962, derives from a talk Bucky gave on April 22, 1961 in East St. Louis, to the Edwardsville Campus Planning Committee of Southern Illinois University, which was addressing the design of a new campus. SIU in Carbondale, Illinois, was where, only two years earlier, Bucky had become a professor, and he and my grandmother Anne had taken up residence. In the essay he paints a broad canvas, anticipating the future of education in one of the early and truly prophetic descriptions of what, almost three decades later, became the information technology revolution via the two-way TVwe call it the Internet:
29 I would say, then, that you are faced with a future in which education is going to be number one amongst the great world industries, within which will flourish an educational machine technology that will provide tools such as the individually selected and articulated two-way TV and an intercontinentally networked, documentaries call-up system, operative over any home two-way TV set.
30 Education Automation [1962], pp. 7273.
31 Children will be able to call up any kind of information they want about any subject and get the latest authoritative TV documentary.... The answers to their questions and probings will be the best information that is available up to that minute in history.
32 Education Automation [1962], p. 68. 14
33 And yet much more than his description of the coming technology of education, the book answers the question, education for what?a theme broadly expanded upon in numerous essays by Bucky from 1961 to 1976 and added to Education Automation in the 1979 book entitled Buckminster Fuller On Education, skillfully complied by Peter H. Wagschal and Robert D. Kahn, and upon which this new edition is based. These further essays explore the great need for a truly comprehensive orientation in education which never loses sight of the epochal changes unfolding on our planet and the unique role of the individual in steering those evolutionary changes.
34 Ideas and Integrities and Education Automation powerfully intersect at the epicenter of design revolution with their inclusion of material from the original World Design Science Decade talks Bucky gave to the International Union of Architects in 1961. Both books exude the paradigm of comprehensive design education. Both books continue to reference the need for a decade-long planetary design initiative. Education Automation had been in the editing process for nearly a month and half just before Buckys July 1961 trip to London to make his presentation to the UIA meeting. Subsequently, at the key climax juncture in the manuscript, the beginning of the final thrust, he weaves in a page of his opening UIA presentation there:
35 What I now propose is that all the universities around the world be encouraged to invest the next ten years in a continuing problem of how to make the total worlds resources, which now serve only 43 percent, serve 100 percent of humanity through competent complex design science.
36 Education Automation [1962], p. 100.
37 For its part, Ideas and Integrities, edited by Robert W. Marks and published in 1963, includes two entire chapters (chapter 14, The Architect as World Planner and chapter 15, World Planning ) that derive directly from Buckys presentation on the World Design Science Decade at the original July 1961 presentation, and the subsequent follow-up presentation he prepared for the UIA biennial in 1963. In addition, the opening piece, Influences on My Work was initially a 1955 letter to John McHale in reply to questions about the genesis of Buckys work, published in the July 1961 edition of Architectural Design at the time of the London UIA congress.
38 These two new books, in representing the span of Buckys career from 1942 to 1976, also importantly reflect the evolution of his work as a teacher and educator. As Allegra Fuller Snyder, my mother and Buckys daughter, pointed out at a lecture this past spring at the Museum of Contemporary art in Chicago, in 1949 Bucky took on his first full visiting teacher assignment at the Institute of Design [in Chicago]. The environment was right. It revealed Bucky as an important teacher because he was challenging himself while challenging his students. They challenged each other.
39 Much of the material in these two books, as would be the case for much of Buckys later published work, derive from transcripts of his talks. Ideas and Integrities comprises the period from those early days in Chicago when the nature of his teaching was characterized by visiting teaching assignments at design, architecture, and art schools, where small groups of students would work with him for a semester with the central focus of tackling a design probleman autonomous living package, a failed prototype for a new kind of structure he would call later a geodesic dome, or subsequently the countless variants of geodesic dome prototypes, testing every kind of geometry, material, and size. Legends abound of his marathon sessions stretching into double-digit hours. Education Automation picks up as his work virtually exploded, with geodesic domes cast around the world propelling him onto the world stage; together with an acceleration of published books and press coverage, the audiences grew more frequent and ever larger.
40 And so it seemed like some kind of confirmation of the readiness, spunk, and appetite of todays student generation that this past spring I learned that the second annual Buckminster Fuller Challenge, a $ 100,000 prize to the winner of a juried competition for innovative solutions to critical global problems, was awarded to an interdisciplinary team of international students from MIT. Their Sustainable Personal Mobility and Mobility-on-Demand Systems project is a breathtaking strategy for urban mobility systems and only underscores the need to engage the next generation in a new decade of design revolution. The Buckminster Fuller Challenge jurors published the following statement about their decision: The winning project is a perfect example of the kind of radical, transformative change that is possible when we reconceive the old ways of doing things and take a systems-based approach to design. ... SPM/MoD isnt just about the design of these lightweight, highly efficient, electric vehicles, it is about inserting that technological innovation into the social and cultural environment and designing an intuitive system within which they function.
41 In 1973, I took a year-and-a-half leave of absence after my first year at college to journey with Bucky on his very heavy pace of traveling the world. By that point he was delivering a major keynote address almost every three daysusually just a couple of hoursto college and general audiences commonly in the thousands. Only rarely did we visit a design school, or stay for more than twenty-four hours in a community.
42 Bucky called his approach to lecturing thinking out loud and he disciplined himself not to think about what he was going to say in advance. As such, all his lifes experiences were his reference, including insights gleaned from his design experiments. And while his idiosyncratic engineering-like language could often sound unfamiliar, his message struck a deep chord with audiences of people generally hearing him for the first timehe always elicited a standing ovation.
43 Having been so reoriented by the experience of journeying around the world with him, observing and participating in the kind of work he was engaged in everywhere he went, after it was over it took me a while to digest what it had all been about. What was that chord that resonated? Clearly it was not just designing new inventions, and certainly most in the audience did not aspire to be design scientists. More than anything, more than his specific inventions or his particular ideas, I concluded it was the universal questions he was asking of himself, and everyone else, such as: What can the little individual do that the great institutions of society cannot?
44 I am sure I am but one of several millions who wonder how much the individual can actually affect the evolutionary processes of his day, while starting only upon his self-accrediting of his own initiative, enterprise and effective transformation capabilities.
45 Ideas and Integrities [1958], p. 57.
46 How can a little individual make an impact?
47 So it could also be true that if your experience actually discerned an industrial gap-closing task that needed your particular experienced attention, and no patron of the task could be discovered who was inherently concerned with such tasks, you might then assume you were being directly challenged by natural evolutionary process with doing something about that gap, which challenge and response were no more mystical than the spontaneous dodging from under a falling tree.
48 Ideas and Integrities [1958], p. 86.
49 What are the principles of being effective as an individual? How do I carry on as an individual? What do I do about earning a living if my priority is addressing the problems of the world?
50 The minute you were not concerned with earning a living and really tackled problem after problem that the other fellow was not tackling, there proved to be a wealth of solvable problems. In fact the whole mass of problems that are worth tackling is so great that any average individual who goes into that kind of a paradise wilderness garden ought to make very good progress. If I have made progress that is mildly notable it is only because I walked into a vast, unattended, potential harvest.
51 Ideas and Integrities [1958], p. 87.
52 Before it became impractical to do so, after almost every talk crowds of people would find their way backstage and surround Buckyto have a moment with him, get a book signed, express an idea, or ask him a question. Undoubtedly the most frequently asked question was, Well Mr. Fuller, I am this or that and a concerned citizen, and what I want to know is, What can I do to make the world work? and he had one answer, You must ask yourself that question; that is what I had to dothat is what the individual is all about; it is not about following some prescription or formula that I can give out.
53 So what was Buckys own answer to the question: What can individuals do that the great political, religious, and economic institutions cannot? What was the conclusion for what he often called his lifes experiment in the efficacy of individual initiative? Perhaps the most concise answer is what he asked that we put on his gravestone: call me trimtab. What exactly is trimtab and why would he want to be called that?
54 Something hit me very hard once, thinking about what one little man could do. Think of the Queen Marythe whole ship goes by and then comes the rudder. And theres a tiny thing on the edge of the rudder called a trim-tab. Its a miniature rudder. Just moving that little trim-tab builds a low pressure that pulls the rudder around. Takes almost no effort at all. So I said that the little individual can be a trim-tab. Society thinks its going right by you, that its left you altogether. But if youre doing dynamic things mentally, the fact is that you can just put your foot out like that and the whole big ship of state is going to go. So I said, Call me Trimtab.3
55 3 R. Buckminster Fuller, page 46 of the transcript of an interview with Barry Farrell for Playboy, February 1972.
56 The beauty of that little trim tab is that it elegantly demonstrates the answer to the question: What can individuals do to change the world? And it is precisely that Bucky had found a tested and well-utilized invention, derived from the principles of nature, that can bring confidence in its objective confirmation of what is possible for individuals.
57 But perhaps more importantly, in these times when we are faced with gargantuan problems and unfathomably large forces invested in their persistence, the trim tab gives us a clue as to how little individuals can be effective in the face of such odds. Not only does it demonstrate that a little device can steer a very large system, it shows us that the absolutely highest leverage spot in steering the system of that ship is perhaps where one would least expect it, at the very trailing edge of the rudder, at the very back (i.e., stern) of the ship.
58 Trim tabs also remind us that the front lines of the design revolution are not necessarily in Washington, DC, or in any other global capital; regardless of the merits of a given politician, we are being completely imprudent to act as if we can leave the mess to them. The trim tabs of individual initiative that drive the necessary changes can turn in the day-to-day actions of each and every one of us.
59 Think of what we are up against in addressing just one component of one major global challenge: coals impact on climate change. Plan B 3.0 echoes what many have concluded: we must rapidly phase out all coal-fired power plants and replace them with renewable energy! Now thats a big ship to turnover seven thousand coal plants in the world today, and all the jobs they represent. And when one watches how this is playing out in the U.S., where the political and financial forces fight vigorously any action in that direction, or in China, which at present is building one new coal-fired plant every day, it is very easy to get discouraged without the possibility of proliferating trim tabs.
60 But, if you look a little closer you find, for example, a dramatic trend toward stopping new coal plant construction; with pressure mounting from all sides against them, and new investment ever more reluctant, there are a growing number of states that are banning or restricting new coal-fired plants. and sitting here writing I look on the internet for current developments and I find that just weeks ago, it was reported that as a result of a decision by the City of Los Angeles:
61 The Intermountain Power Agency (IPA) announced Thursday it has given up plans to build an additional coal-fired unit. Its biggest customerthe city of Los Angelessignaled its intent July 2 to phase out use of all coal-based electricity by 2020. IPAs expansion project had effectively died in its original iteration when the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power pulled out of the deal in 2007, Reuters reported.4
62 4 Tilde Herrera, L.a.s Coal Ban Leads to another abandoned Power Plant, Greenbiz.com, July 13, 2009, http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2009/07/13/las-coal-ban-leads- another-abandoned-power-plant (accessed August 20, 2009).
63 Nations change the world, states change nations, cities and counties changes states, communities change cities and counties, and, all the way at the very tail end of the ship, trim tabs change communities!
64 This young world is about to take over, to help us design ourselves to make man a success on earth.... We must design our way to positive effectiveness, and not just be negative about politicians and what they are doing.
65 Ideas and Integrities [1962], p. 398.
66 There have been many revolutions in history. The American Revolution famously began with the shot heard round the world. There was Mahatma Gandhis profoundly powerful non-violent revolution that turned India into a democracy and captured the imagination of the world community. Perhaps the design revolution begins with the flutter of trim tabs flappingor maybe it is an altogether silent one, for few in the world would recognize it by that name. Maybe the announcement by Bucky of his World Design Science Decade project in 1961 was not the epicenter of an earthquake, but a gust of wind carrying countless airborne seedpods to float off into the landscape on a gentle summer breeze.
67 Making the worlds totally available resources serve one hundred percent of an exploding population may only be accomplished by a boldly accelerated design evolution which adequately increases the present over-all performance per units of invested resources. This is a task of radical technical innovation rather than political rationalization.
68 Ideas and Integrities [1963], p. 339.
69 When I think of Buckys advocacy for re-tooling the planet to live off of our energy income rather than our savings account of fossil fuels and nuclear energy, which, while in his mind from his earliest writings, really blossomed in the sixties; or when I recall the advanced generation windmill he prototyped with young aeronautical engineer Hans Meyer on an island off the coast of Maine in the early seventies, it is obvious this accelerated design evolutionor revolutionhas come a long way.
70 That, with sun energy wealth (in one of its many conversion phases) leaking in from a myriad of new sources from which, by any recognized feudal agricultural economic precedent, wealth was not supposed to gush, the astonished discoverer of each latest leak could stand in front of it and fill his back pockets without question of his legal proprietorship to that wealth.
71 Ideas and Integrities [1942], p. 135.
72 A half-century later we are witnessing alternative energy front and center on the strategic landscape of current world affairsa re-design of our world before our very eyes, in a cosmic instant. The New York Times, citing a study by the United Nations Environment Program, recently reported that Global investors spent about $ 250 billion building new power capacity in 2008, and for the first time the lions share of that money went to renewable sources.5 Think of it.
73 5 James Kanter, Clean Energy Funding Trumps Fossil Fuels, New York Times, June 3, 2009, http://greeninc.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/03/clean-energy-funding- trumps-fossil-fuels/ (accessed August 20, 2009).
74 Man now enters the phase of meager yet conscious participation in the anticipatory design
undertakings of Nature. This conscious participation itself is changing from an awk- ward,
arbitrary, trial and error ignorance to an intuitively conceived, yet rigorously serviced, disciplined
elegance.
Ideas and Integrities [1960], p. 323.
75 In 2006 I first heard one of the worlds leading climatologists, James Hansen of NASA, on television conveying his assessment that we had only ten years left to turn around the climate crisisin time to avoid a planetary ecological tipping point of no return. This stark wake-up call could only begin to be digested by reflecting upon Buckys design science decade proposalwhich provided some sense of a possibility that there was a way to turn the ship within ten years. Even though Hansens clock is now down to seven, perhaps we have a running start, since a silent design revolution is well underway. Clearly we do not have the time to wait on some leader to officially launch a comprehensive initiative to address the complex of crises facing us, as John F. Kennedy did in 1961 when he set a goal of putting a man on the moon by the end of the decade. Instead, each of us individual trim tabs will have to declare this project started, one by one. But with time so short, and the crisis so far beyond just climate change, it is essential we are crystal clear on this projects mission.
76 In the eighties and nineties I was engaged in developing and teaching courses on Buckys problem-solving approaches in corporate settings. In those days and in the corporate environment, I took note of the fact that the latest rage was the new idea of mission statements. For years it seemed like everywhere in the world I went, organizations, institutions, and even individuals had or were developing mission statements. What is the mission statement of humanity ? Has one been done? I wondered. Almost instantly it dawned on me that throughout his career Bucky, through countless statements about making the world work, had been drafting, developing, and refining just such a statement. And somewhere along the way he had arrived at a version that provides the kind of clarity so desperately needed today. In much the haiku-like form we often associate with mission statements, he proposed:
77 To make the world work
for 100 % of humanity
in the shortest possible time
through spontaneous cooperation
without ecological offense
or the disadvantage of anyone.
78 For New Fuller Readers
79 For those of you reading Bucky for the first time, I offer a few specific tips for your journey through his universe. You may find, with the pulsation from the macro to the micro, from the comprehensive to the incisive, that your mind is stretched and turned in a way that is, at first, disorienting. Think of it instead as a re-orientationa real orientation that can at first be dizzying. Give yourself a lot of time. His books are thinking tools, catalysts for shape-shifting, for leaping far beyond the box of normal habitual thought processes. Perhaps a dose-a-day will be your pace, to thoroughly examine and digest the ideas as they comepaying attention to the changes in your own awareness ... daily, weekly, even monthly. Be encouraged: like learning a new language or a new computer program, I trust the current brain researchers would confirm that reading Bucky is just the kind of endeavor that can help us build brain cells and their interconnections.
80 Bucky also invents new words, or uses common words in ways that are new, precisely because he is attempting to steer clear of the limiting habits of thinking we all inherited. Starting at the age of 32, he made it a discipline, to think carefully about the words he used, resisting the temptation of saying things the way everyone says them,dispelling the attempt to make them more palatable. For example, he would frequently point outwe still say the words sunrise and sunset, even though we have known for hundreds of years that the earth revolves around the sun! In response, someone wrote him suggesting alternatives, sunsight and sunclipsewhich he quickly adopted.
81 When reading Bucky I find it useful to apply a strategy I learned in foreign language classes: as you begin to converse in the new language let the words pass through without attempting to grasp every one individually. Stick with the continuity, even if it means that on the first time through you miss a number of details. For if you get the continuity, and are able to stay focused on the big picture and the underlying principles, you will glean a sense of the context, even if all the details are not yet clear. And with this general sense of what he is saying, you may discover the inspiration that draws you back a second time, to begin progressively examining the details. Bucky suggested this was in fact a principle of universe: there is a fundamental advantage in any problem solving or critical thinking when one starts with the whole (or overview), and then proceeds to the parts (or details).
82 A long-time friend and close associate of Buckys, Don Moore, a gifted systems analyst and engineer, always used to say, Bucky is the one person I ever met for whom nothing was ever out of context. And for Bucky the context, the way to see clearly our way through the challenges facing humanity, is always by starting with the whole universe. For Bucky the answers to the problems of our world are all around us in the beautiful design of the universe. And in the end, more than the facts, figures, particular predictions, or solutions he developed, were the underlying principles of universe to which he was pointing. Thank goodness, nature reveals to us the state of the art in design and technology, if we will look.
83 Jaime Snyder
84 California, September 2009