The Design Initiative

The second of the six World Design Science Decade documents (1963), by R. Buckminster Fuller with John McHale for the World Resources Inventory at Southern Illinois University. Where Document 1 inventories what humanity has and needs, Document 2 issues the call to act on it — Fuller's design-science initiative to the world's architects. Part of the digitized WDSD series.

What it argues

The document is organized around Fuller's discourse to the International Symposium on Architecture of the International Union of Architects (Mexico City, 10 October 1963), then extends it into program and checklist:

• World Design Initiative. Fuller addresses the world's architects directly: the profession is uniquely placed to become the coordinating "comprehensive designer" of a world that works. He frames the extraordinary, sudden change in the man–earth relationship and argues the design professions must take the initiative rather than react.
• The Five Two-Year Increment Phases. The program's method: the ten-year world facilities redesign is broken into five two-year phases, each a concrete increment of the larger retooling — the procedural spine the rest of the series (especially Document 4) fills in.
• Historical Blast Off into the Space Age of Man. A sweeping narrative of humanity's acceleration into a technological, off-planet-capable species — the historical case that the leverage now exists to serve everyone.
• The Cumulative Nature of Wealth. Fuller's redefinition of wealth as organized capability — the accumulated, irreversible know-how and energy-handling capacity of humanity — not gold or money. Wealth, so defined, only ever increases, which is why "more with less" is possible.
• Universal Requirements Checklist. A systematic checklist of the performance requirements a dwelling (and by extension any designed environment) must satisfy for a genuine "dwelling advantage" — design specified by function and human need rather than convention.

Why it matters

Document 2 is the hinge from inventory to action in the WDSD program. It is where Fuller turns the data of Document 1 into a method (the five phases) and a mandate (the design initiative addressed to architects). Two of its ideas travel widely through Fuller's later work: the cumulative, non-depletable definition of wealth as organized capability, and the Universal Requirements checklist approach to specifying environments by performance. It is the document that literally initiates the decade-long program.

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.

See Also

• Inventory of World Resources, Human Trends and Needs — the inventory this initiative mobilizes
• Comprehensive Thinking — the next document, on the epistemology behind the initiative
• Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth — the compact statement of the comprehensive-design worldview this initiative enacts
• John McHale — Fuller's collaborator across the WDSD series

Sources

• world-design-science-decade-document-2 (raw pointer)
• document-2-the-design-initiative/index.md — the full transcribed text (with typeset PDF + EPUB + searchable scan)