Inventory of World Resources, Human Trends and Needs

The first of the six World Design Science Decade documents (1963), by R. Buckminster Fuller and John McHale for the World Resources Inventory at Southern Illinois University. It sets the program's premise: take the whole planet and the whole of humanity as the frame of reference, inventory what we actually have and need, and design accordingly. Part of the digitized WDSD series.

What it argues

The document moves in four movements (its chapter structure), then appendices and a bibliography:

• Man in Universe. It opens by insisting on the largest possible frame of reference — "man, the earth, and the universe of which this forms a part." Fuller's operational definition of Universe ("the aggregate of all men's consciously apprehended and communicated experiences") makes the whole a manageable finite whole, and casts each individual life as a "micro-universe" of the same kind. The point is methodological: world problems can only be solved by thinking comprehensively, from the whole.
• Industrialization. It charts the historically sudden acceleration of industrialization and its uneven spread across the globe — the engine that has changed the scale and velocity of humanity's effect on the planet.
• World Energy. The hinge of the argument is energy, measured in energy slaves — Fuller's metric expressing each society's mechanical-energy consumption as the equivalent number of human laborers it replaces. The explosive growth in energy slaves is what has, for the first time in history, made universal high standard of living physically conceivable.
• World Resources, Human Trends and Needs. It then inventories material resources against population and need, arguing that scarcity is not a fixed physical fact but a function of how comprehensively we deploy what we have ("doing more with less").

The thesis throughout: the means now exist 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" — and realizing it is a problem of comprehensive anticipatory design science, addressed to the world's design and architecture students, not a problem of politics or reform.

Why it matters

This is the data-driven foundation of Fuller's whole "design science revolution." Where Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth states the worldview compactly and rhetorically, the WDSD documents try to substantiate it with resource and energy figures and a working method (inventory → trends → needs → design). Document 1 establishes the inventory and the energy-slave argument the rest of the series builds on, and it is the seed of the World Game. Its framing of finite global resources, accelerating industrialization, and design (not politics) as the lever has only become more legible with time.

About the source

Originally published 1963 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. It is the first of six WDSD documents (Phase I, 1963–1967).

See Also

• 50 Years of the Design Science Revolution — the World Resources Inventory volume gathering the design-science program this series launched
• Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth — the compact statement of the finite-resources, comprehensive-design worldview this document substantiates with data
• Pilot for Spaceship Earth — the World Game and design-science program this inventory seeds
• Fuller's Coined & Redefined Terms — defines the vocabulary used here (energy slave, design science, World Game, ephemeralization)
• John McHale — Fuller's co-author on this World Design Science Decade document
• The Design Initiative — the initiative that mobilizes this inventory
• Comprehensive Thinking — the comprehensive-thinking method behind the program
• The Ten Year Program — the phased world-retooling program built on this inventory
• Comprehensive Design Strategy — the Phase II design strategy and the World Game
• The Ecological Context: Energy and Materials — the closing ecological framing of the series

Sources

• world-design-science-decade-document-1 (raw pointer)
• document-1-inventory-of-world-resources/index.md — the full transcribed text (with typeset PDF + EPUB + searchable scan)