Buckminster Fuller was an American architect, systems theorist, author, designer, inventor and futurist. He tried to address humanity's basic needs by employing principles of nature and design science to create more sustainable and effective systems using less resources. His work emphasized synergy, whole systems thinking and tensegrity structures. He is best known for inventing the geodesic dome, developing tensegrity structures, and popularizing the concept of "Spaceship Earth".

1. Designing A World That Works For Everyone Introduction to Comprehensive Design Science and Other Insights of R. Buckminster Fuller © 2003 Greg Watson

3. Who Was Buckminster Fuller?

4. I made up my mind as a Rule of Communication that I wouldn't care if I was not understood--so long as I was not misunderstood.

8. " A true renaissance man and one of the greatest minds of our times, Richard Buckminster Fuller's contribution as a geometrician, educator, and architect-designer are the benchmarks of accomplishment in their fields. Among his most notable inventions and discoveries are synergetic geometry, geodesic structures, and tensegrity structures. Mr. Fuller reminds us all that America is a place of pioneers, haven for innovation and the free expression of ideas". Buckminster Fuller's Medal of Freedom citation, received from President Reagan in 1981 reads as follows:

13. “ There is no energy crisis, food crisis or environmental crisis. There is a crisis of ignorance.” Buckminster Fuller

18. Linear Addition + = 2 1 + 1 =

19. Synergetic Addition + = 4 1 + 1 =

20. Emergent Properties Closest packing of tetrahedra can only be accomplished with octahedra

23. Lack of understanding of whole systems is the source of our crisis of ignorance

24. Spaceship Earth

26. Where there is no vision, The people perish Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1841

28. 1 2 3 4 5 8 9 6 7 10 11 12 Design Science Planning Process

29. Design Science Planning Process Choose Problem Situation 1 Define Problems 2 Define Preferred State 3 Describe Present State 4

30. Design Preferred System 5 Inventory Alternatives 6 Develop Evaluation Criteria 7 Develop Implementation Strategies 8 Document Process 9 Develop Artifacts 10 Communicate Plan 11 Initiate Larger Planning Process 12

33. Nature’s Polyhedral Design

34. Systems “ A system is the first subdivision of Universe into a conceivable entity separating all that is nonsimultaneously and geometrically outside the system, ergo irrelevant, from all that is nonsimultaneously and geometrically inside and irrelevant to the system” Buckminster Fuller. Synergetics

37. Laws of Form [A] universe comes into being when a space is severed or taken apart. The skin of a living organism cuts off an outside from an inside. So does the circumference of a circle in a plane. By tracing the way we represent such a severance, we can begin to reconstruct, with an accuracy and coverage that appear almost uncanny, the basic forms underlying linguistic, mathematical, physical, and biological science, and can begin to see how the familiar laws of our own experience follow inexorably from the original act of severance. The act is itself already remembered, even if unconsciously, as our first attempt to distinguish different things in a world where, in the first place, the boundaries can be drawn anywhere we please. G. Spencer Brown

38. Nature’s Polyhedral Design Pollen Hive

39. Volvox- freshwater colonial protozoan Geodesic Dome

40. Buckminsterfullerenes

41. Nature’s Tensegrity Design Strategy Scientific American January 1998

42. Structural Synergy + = Spheres have largest volume-to-surface ratio but are easily deformed by gravity and other forces Tetrahedra have smallest volume-to-surface ration, but are structurally rigid Geodesic Dome: Maximum space enclosure/structural integrity

45. Precessional Winds

46. Applied Precession

51. Dy namic + max imum + tens ion = Dymaxion . Creating ever more life support using less and less resources By using the Dymaxion Map in combination with the enormous database resources and computer graphics available today, it is now highly feasible to accurately and clearly display the inventory of world resources, trends and needs in multiple dimensions

52. Copyleft © 1995 Christopher Rywalt.

53. “Call Me Trimtab” “ Something hit me very hard once, thinking about what one little man could do. Think of the Queen Mary—the whole ship goes by and then comes the rudder. And there’s a tiny thing on the edge of the rudder called a trim-tab. It’s 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 it’s going right by you, that it’s left you altogether. But if you’re 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.” -Excerpted from R. Buckminster Fuller tape transcript for Barry Farrell for Playboy interview, 2/1972.

55. Synergetics “ Synergetics, the comprehensive geometry I have systematized, unlike all other systems of geometry, incorporates both the physical and the metaphysical. The metaphysical involves that which can be experienced but is independent of size and is weightless and energyless, i.e. qualitative rather than quantitative.” R. Buckminster Fuller

56. 4-Dimensional Coordinate System Vector Equilibrium x y z Cartesian Coordinates

57. Radiation and Gravity Disintegrative radiation and integrative gravity in symbiosis describe the elusive object of the quest for a “unified field.”

58. Closest Packing

59. 2 Frequency Triangle 1 2

60. 3 Frequency Triangle 1 2 3

61. Closest packed spheres in a plane 60 o

62. Twelve spheres around center sphere

63. Vector Equilibrium

64. 0-frequency 10f 2 +2 = 12

66. 2-frequency 10f 2 +2 = 42

68. 3-frequency 10f 2 +2 = 92

70. Isotropic Vector Matrix

71. Centers of Vector Equilibrium

73. Copyright 1977 Mark Diamond Jitterbug Transformations

74. Jitterbug Transformations

75. a 2 + b 2 = c 2 a b c a b c

76. b 2 a 2 c 2 + =

77. a b c

78. The Case of the“Ghost Cube” . . . . . . . . H W D

79. Parts of Whole System . . . . . . . . Vertex Face Edge

80. . . . . . .

82. "His life was so important that it shines almost with the same intensity now that it did when he had it." --John Cage