World Resources Inventory
Establishment
The World Resources Inventory (WRI) was established at Southern Illinois University (SIU) Carbondale in the early 1960s by R. Buckminster Fuller and John McHale. Fuller had arrived at SIU as its first visiting lecturer in 1956 and became a research professor in 1959. The project grew out of Fuller's July 1961 proposal to the International Union of Architects (IUA) at their VIIth Congress in London, in which he challenged the world's architectural schools to spend the next decade solving how design could extend resource access from the 40% of humanity then served to 100%. By 1962 research was underway at SIU, and by 1964 Fuller and McHale had moved operations to an office at 711 South University Avenue in Carbondale.
Key People
- R. Buckminster Fuller — originator and co-author of the WDSD documents.
- John McHale — British artist, Independent Group member, and Fuller's principal associate; directed the WRI day-to-day, co-authored and edited the document series, and taught design-history courses at SIU. McHale first encountered Fuller at Yale in 1955-56.
- Magda Cordell McHale — John's wife; participated in the inventory work. After John's death in 1978, she continued futures-studies work through Centers for Integrative Studies at SUNY Binghamton and SUNY Buffalo.
- Teams of SIU students who helped compile the data-intensive reports.
World Design Science Decade Documents
The WRI's flagship output was the World Design Science Decade 1965-1975 document series, subtitled "Five Two-Year Phases of a World Retooling Design Proposed to the International Union of Architects for Adoption by World Architectural Schools."
| Doc | Year | Title | Author(s) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1963 | Inventory of World Resources, Human Trends and Needs | Fuller & McHale |
| 2 | 1964 | The Design Initiative | Fuller |
| 3 | 1965 | Comprehensive Thinking | Fuller |
| 4 | 1965 | The Ten Year Program | McHale |
| 5 | 1967 | Comprehensive Design Strategy (incl. "Man With a Chronofile") | Fuller |
| 6 | 1967 | The Ecological Context: Energy and Materials | McHale |
Documents 1-4 constitute Phase I (1963-1965); Documents 5-6 constitute Phase II (1967).
Relationship to World Game
The WRI was explicitly conceived as the research arm for Fuller's World Game. The WRI gathered the resource data the game's simulations required. Fuller's 1971 "World Game Series: Document One" described the game as an "Integrative Resource Utilization Planning Tool," building directly on WRI data. In 1972, Fuller, Medard Gabel, Howard J. Brown, and others founded the World Game Institute in Philadelphia. That institute produced the World Energy Data Sheet (1980) and educational software called Global Recall (1993), before its assets were purchased by o.s. Earth Inc. in 2001 and transferred to the Schumacher Center for New Economics in 2019.
Afterlife
After the WDSD documents were completed, the McHales left SIU. John McHale published several related books — The Future of the Future (1968), The Ecological Context (1970), World Facts and Trends (1972). He died in 1978. Fuller's archival papers from SIU (1928-1965) are held at Morris Library's Special Collections. The BFI hosts downloadable PDFs of all six WDSD documents.
Sources
- Buckminster Fuller Institute — World Design Science Decade
- World Game — Wikipedia
- John McHale (artist) — Wikipedia
- SIU Design Department — McHale page
- WDSD Phase I Doc 1 (BFI)
- SIU Special Collections — Fuller papers