50 Years of the Design Science Revolution and the World Game

"There is nothing new under the sun," Ecclesiastes tells us. Truly, to some large extent most "innovations" are variations on a previous theme. Once in a lifetime, though, there is an Archimedes, an Aquinas, a Michelangelo, a Newton, a Darwin, an Einstein whose thought is so startlingly fresh that its insights become an enthusiastic start for an entire new age of endeavor. One such man is R. Buckminster Fuller. — Thomas Broussard Turner, Foreword

A documentary anthology assembled by the World Resources Inventory (Buckminster Fuller, 3500 Market Street, Philadelphia) and published in 1969 in cooperation with Southern Illinois University. Rather than a single continuous essay, the book reprints the magazine and journal pieces — together with the public commentary they drew — through which Fuller's "design science revolution" became visible to the world over half a century. It belongs to the "World Design Science Decade" program, whose theme is "How to Make the World Work."

Structure

The volume is built as a chronological sequence of reprints, framed by a Foreword (by Thomas Broussard Turner of Southern Illinois University) and a "History" section in which Fuller recounts his forecasting method. Its table of contents groups the reprints into evolutionary phases:

The 4D Fuller House and the World Town Plan — conception of the industrialized house, including the 1928 Chicago Evening Post "Tree-Like Style of Dwelling Is Planned," the 1929 Harvard "4D" catalog, Harvard Crimson and Fortune ("Five Questions and a Striking Answer," Archibald MacLeish, 1932) pieces.
The Fuller Dymaxion Bathroom — the industrialized mechanical package (1937, "The Ladle").
An Inventory of the World's Resources — including the landmark February 1940 Fortune "U.S. Industrialization" issue and Henry Luce's "The Press: New Era."
The Dymaxion Dwelling Machine — production of the industrialized house (1946 Fortune, "Fuller's House").
The Geodesic Dome and Its Acceptance — a controlled environment (1954 "Marines Try Out Flyable Shelter," "An Expo Named Buckminster Fuller").
Mechanical Package Fallout from the Space Program — "The Year 2000" (Architectural Design), "City of the Future" (Playboy), "Why Not Roofs Over Our Cities" (Think).
The World Game — the capstone, including "World Game: How It Came About."

Core ideas

The 25-year forecast. Trained at the U.S. Naval Academy in celestial navigation, ballistics, and long-range logistics, Fuller in 1927 set out to test how far ahead competent forecasts could run. He concluded a "fairly reasonable forecast" reaches about 25 years — roughly one industrial "tooling" generation, after which the bulk of inventions are "melted up" and recirculated into more effective uses. His 1927 forecast extended a half-century, to 1977.
Design science as a life agenda. "Design science revolution" was Fuller's own term for both his Dymaxion operating plan for a more efficient technology and "an operating agenda for his own life."
Change the environment, not man. Aggression to force change "only guarantees that someone must lose for someone to win"; instead, show people the power of changing their environment by "doing more with less."
Livingry over weaponry. The 1927 Dymaxion House was conceived as an air-deliverable, mass-producible dwelling-service industry — a way to transfer high scientific capability "from a weaponry to a livingry focus," achieving success for all rather than physical reform through politics.
Provenance of the data. The argument rests on Fuller's "Inventory of World Resources, Human Trends and Needs," begun in 1917, updated in 1927, again via 1936-38 copper-trend work for Phelps Dodge, and again for the February 1940 Fortune tenth-anniversary issue (the only Fortune issue to run three editions). Fuller later acquired Time, Inc.'s research files.

The World Game

The book's climax. Fuller proposes a "computerized gaming concept" in which individuals or teams play with the real data of the World Resources Inventory — resources, trends, vital needs — each developing and playing through a theory of "how to make the total world work successfully for all of humanity." He explicitly opposes it to John von Neumann's game theory, which he calls "Drop Dead" because it is "always predicated upon one side losing 100 percent." In the World Game, "to win… everybody must be made physically" successful. He cites the surprising twentieth-century rise from under 1 percent to about 40 percent of humanity living above any prior monarch's standard as evidence that doing more with less can serve 100 percent. Southern Illinois University (under President Delyte W. Morris) tied the World Game to its centennial, and the State of Illinois appropriated a $4 million matching fund (signed by Governor Kerner, September 1967).

Significance

The volume is the most explicit single-cover record of how Fuller's ideas reached the public over fifty years, and of the through-line connecting his housing, transportation, dome, and resource-inventory work to the World Game. It documents both the inventions and the cultural reception (skepticism then assimilation) that Fuller saw as the predictable arc of forecast-driven design science.

Sources