Utopia or Oblivion: The Prospects For Humanity (published in 1969) -- Contains Fuller's challenging blueprint for the future. Taken together, chapter 10; "Curricula and the Design Initiative" and chapter 11; "Design Strategy" succinctly lay out the critical elements of Fuller's approach to equipping the student of design to assume "the tasks that no one else was doing or attempting to do, which if done would physically and economically advantage society and eliminate pain."

This book is a must read for those committed to taking the design initiative.

"Curricula and the Design Initiative"
(Excerpt from chapter 10 of Utopia or Oblivion (by RBF 1969)

"Taking the initiative means that the design-scientist - like the medical scientist - will no longer operate on a basis of having to be retained by a client to carry out the client's prime design concepts.

The curriculum will prepare the design-scientist graduate to undertake fundamental invention, self-underwriting, development, and experimental proof of invention as demonstrated for instance by the Wright brothers wherein the design-science professional will be equipped with all of the economic, legal, and technological knowledge necessary for reducing such inventions to going industrial practice.

To realize such "breakthrough-magnitude" inventions - commercially, militarily, or even socially - involves the individual preparing himself for the competent taking of the initiative in a whole new industry and its progressive development, testing, prototyping, tooling, marketing, servicing, maintaining, operating, and phasing-in of progressive evolutionary components within the totally new industrial system together with designed phasing-out of equipment and functions made obsolete by the new industry. This, in turn, releases metals, and other materials, time, and energy resources for reinvestment in the newest phase of the evolutionarily emerging system.

The design scientist would not be concerned exclusively with the seat of a tractor but with the whole concept of production and distribution of food, which might possibly lead It will then be appropriate for the professional Design Science Society of the world and its various continental sub-societies, as spokesmen for the profession, to coordinate the world-around design-science school curricula and to notify each and all the industries concerned of their undertakings and to make recommendations to the various industries regarding the progressive availability of the individual professional graduates most competent to carry out the finalizing phases of the new services to be provided.

This taking of the initiative and assumption of primary responsibility - vacated a third of a century ago by the "great world pirates" and left ignorantly by society to their political representations to discharge - all seems very new to the professional world of architecture, engineering and all of the sciences other than the medical sciences. However, this is exactly the initiative and responsibility the medical sciences are already now shouldering in respect to man's internal organisms.

I propose that, in due course, design science - as the objective applied discipline accomplished by combined industrial design, engineering, architecture, and all the sciences - shall be so organized as to provide effective anticipatory strategies for formulating and managing the evolution of mankind's external, metabolic regeneration of the industrial self-organisms in the same anticipatory service manner that the medical profession has anticipatorily dealt with individual man's interior, organic processes of metabolic regeneration.

But from now on I think we must all assume that Malthus was wrong and thus it is normal for man to be a physical and economic success. - that it is abnormal for any to be a failure - that man's preoccupation must be with his exquisite antientropic functioning in universe at-large and at-small - that by producing machines and tools that will produce more with less than was ever produced before, man must continually demonstrate the mastery of the physical by the metaphysical faculties with which he is endowed.

"Design Strategy"
(excerpt from chapter 11 of Utopia or Oblivion (by RBF 1969)

"Though there are many special concepts which constantly reoccur in my day-to-day deliberations, I find there are 14 which dominate All of them overlap integratingly. Part of the content of one will of necessity often reappear under other concepts due to the synergetic interactions. I will group and discuss all the secondary concepts unique to my philosophy under the following 14 main concepts:"


1. Universe
2. Humanity
3. Children
4. Teleology
5. Reform the Environment
6. General Systems Theory
7. Industrialization
8. Design Science
9. World Service Industries
10. Ephemeralization and Invisible Common Wealth
11. Prime Design Initiative
12. Self Disciplines
13. Comprehensive Coordination
14. World Communities and Subcommunities of World Man

"My recommendations for a curriculum of design science:"


1. Synergetics
2. General Systems Theory
3. Theory of Games ( von Neumann)
4. Chemistry and Physics
5. Topology, projective geometry
6. Cybernetics
7. Communications
8. Meteorology
9. Geology
10. Biology
11. Sciences of Energy
12. Political Geography
13. Ergonomics
14. Production Engineering

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