Comprehensive Design Strategy

The fifth of the six World Design Science Decade documents (1967) and the first of Phase II, by R. Buckminster Fuller for the World Resources Inventory at Southern Illinois University. It gathers Fuller's mature design strategy and contains the WDSD's first full statement of the World Game. Part of the digitized WDSD series.

What it argues

• Man With a Chronofile. Fuller opens with his lifelong experiment: the Chronofile, an exhaustive documentation of one human life (his own) as a controlled experiment in "what one individual can do on behalf of all humanity." It frames the whole strategy as empirical and personal.
• Introduction to / Design Strategy (and Addendum). The core exposition of Fuller's dominant concepts as a coherent strategy rather than a list — comprehensive anticipatory design science, ephemeralization (more with less), doing more with less until it can be done for everyone, and reform-of-environment-not-man.
• Vision 65 Keynote & Summary Lectures. Fuller's addresses to the Vision 65 congress, restating the worldview for a design-and-communications audience.
• The World Game — How to Make the World Work. The document's climax and its most historically important section: the first programmatic articulation of the World Game — a serious, data-driven simulation in which players redistribute and redesign the world's resources to raise the standard of living for 100% of humanity without weapons or disadvantage to anyone. It is the operational counter-proposal to war-gaming.
• Appendices. Student project briefs (the program was pedagogical) and a Fuller booklist.

Why it matters

Document 5 is where the WDSD becomes strategy and where the World Game is born as a program. The World Game is one of Fuller's most influential inventions — the direct ancestor of resource-simulation, global-modeling, and "serious games" for planetary problems — and this is its founding WDSD text. Together with the Chronofile framing (life as experiment) and the compact restatement of his dominant concepts, it is among the most quotable and consequential documents in the series.

About the source

Originally published 1967 by the World Resources Inventory, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. Digitized here in full via the codexis pipeline (OCR → LaTeX → WikiJS Markdown), preserving the original wording and typography; typeset-PDF and EPUB editions and the original searchable scan sit beside the page.

See Also

• The Ten Year Program — the Phase I program this strategy carries into Phase II
• The Ecological Context: Energy and Materials — the next and final document
• Inventory of World Resources, Human Trends and Needs — the resource inventory this strategy deploys
• Pilot for Spaceship Earth — the World Game and design-science program first stated here in full
• Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth — the compact statement of the same design strategy

Sources

• world-design-science-decade-document-5 (raw pointer)
• document-5-comprehensive-design-strategy/index.md — the full transcribed text (with typeset PDF + EPUB + searchable scan)