Eight Strategies for Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science

In 1950, Buckminster Fuller set up an outline for a course in Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science. Taught at MIT in 1956 as part of the Creative Engineering Laboratory, this course by Fuller probably served as one of their more unusual offerings. The students who took the course, all engineers, industrial designers, materials scientists and chemists, represented research and development corporations across America. The following presents highlights from Fuller’s syllabus outlining eight components of the course, written before the Dymaxion Map reached its final, icosahedral phase and preceding the publication of Synergetics I and II by twenty-five years.

This is a theory which at its outset in 1927 promised to develop world-around effectiveness of an individual’s initiation despite the formidability of prevailing economic patterns. The name of the theory explains this strategy: an INDUSTRIALLY REALIZABLE, COMPREHENSIVE, ANTICIPATORY DESIGN SCIENCE.

If adopted by one individual and proved to be valid, it must in due course become comprehensively operative even though none other than the initiating individual ever consciously and formally adopted it. It would, however, emerge into popular adoption only through emergency.

Subject 1: Strategy of Formulation

From the comprehensive to the particular.
* Experimental proofs of the validity of SYNERGY: The behavior of wholes unpredicted by the behavior of parts.
* Definition of “principle” as regenerative behavior patterning.
* Definition of “Universe” as the aggregate of all men’s teleologically translated experience.
* Definition of “teleology” as the subjective to objective, intermittent, only-spontaneous, borderline-conscious and within self communicating system that distills equitable principles – from our pluralities of matching experiences and re-integrates selections from those net generalized principles into unique experimental control patterns.
* Definition of a “system” as zonal subdivision of Universe itself subdividing the microcosmic within-ness from the macrocosmic withoutness.
* Definition of “precession” as the effect of one motion system on another motion system which results in a plurality of complementary transformation accommodations.

Subject 2: Strategy of Mathematical Structuring

History of an exploration and discovery of a comprehensive synergetic-energetic co-ordinate system employed by nature. Disclosure of an omni-rational, reciprocal functioning of co-evolutionary design accommodations in nature. Exposition of the comprehensively rational integrity of Synergetic-Energetic Geometry.

Subject 3: Strategy of Geographical Reconnaissance

Assumption in 1927 of an accelerated realization of a comprehensive Airocean World traffic-patternings, Reorientation to most economical aerodynamic integrations. Ascendency to economic primacy of Airocean World transport service and equipment industry.

Subject 4: Strategy of Communication

Assumption in 1927 of a comprehensive, approximately instantaneous, electromagnetic-wave-oceanworld. Adoption in 1927 of an accelerated realization of a wireless, aural-optical, omni-scrutability of comprehensive, evolutionary patterning of economic geography, world industrialization network, technological evolution and scientific penetration.

Subject 5: Strategy of Priority Ranking Governing World and History’s Progressive Resource Reinvestments

The comprehensively packaged advancement of the world-around high-standards-of-living of all men adopted as the number one priority of focus of the swiftly multiplying scientific effectiveness in management of the world-around industrial network.

Subject 6: Strategy of Economics

Fundamental economic recourse to the comprehensive world-around chemical resource and to the all-history technical experience resources. Comprehensive recirculation of chemical elements. Progressive waves of comprehensive design replacement phases as evolutionary re-circulatory, regenerative resource processing. Accelerating replacement of humans by machines in all muscle, reflex, regenerative feed-back, integrative calculation, infra- and ultra sensorial exploratory inventorying.

Subject 7: Strategy of Education

Progressive transfer of population from physical production and distribution functions to a fundamental preoccupation with education, experiment, search, research, development, prototyping, tooling, tool-to-make-tooling-instrument-to-make-instrument-regenerative-step-up-transformation of technical man-advantage over a priori environmental patterning.

Subject 8: Strategy of Design

Comprehensive integration of the factors of Strategies 1 through 7 in formulation of INDUSTRIALLY REALIZABLE COMPREHENSIVE, ANTICIPATORY DESIGN SCIENCE in evolutionary waves scientifically synchronized with progressive rate of augmentable step-up of the comprehensive performance effectiveness of the progressively available resource inventory in the obsoleting zone of out-performed design in such a manner as to ever avoid impairment of latest and most advanced comprehensive effectiveness of the going “processes.” Designed pull-up of the bottom vs. austere pull-down of the top.