Our vision, called Appropedia, is built upon the remarkable success of wiki-based infrastructures. Appropedia is expanding this concept to include collaborative research, development and problem-solving by incorporating real-world experiences.

Curated Archive 2008

Using Fuller’s Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science (CADS) approach, our solution is to launch the first permanently manned scientific undersea colony in the oceans in a two phase plan.

Barefoot College is a non-governmental organization that has been providing basic services and solutions to problems in rural communities for more than forty years, with the objective of making them self-sufficient and sustainable.

This approach generates structures that can be morphed in arbitrary fashion while maintaining structural strength at all times, whether used for a ship’s hull, an aircraft wing, a car’s aerodynamic shape, a bed, a chair, or energy harvesting systems using wind, water, or the sun.

BioMosaics interactive planning is a mid level (i.e., building to human settlement) scale tool whereby participants plan land uses with the goal of balancing natural resource supply and sink functions (i.e., natural capital throughput) with basic human life support needs.

SUMMARY: I propose to build and launch such a system which I devised and filed patent for several years ago -- a computer aided design (CAD) system for the collective design and funding of the highest ROI mechanisms for directing human effort and attention known: prizes, contests, and mass incentives.

SUMMARY: “Engagement through Exposure” is an effort to make visible, that which is invisible using ubiquitous technology to connect people with their environment.

After years of exploration, we are activating a pathfinding project called 10xE. It aims to accelerate the fundamental reform of engineering pedagogy and practice by transforming how engineers think about design. Our proposed method is to create, test, refine, disseminate, and create strong “demand pull” to propagate and apply a vivid casebook showing very large (often order-of-magnitude) energy and resource savings, with uncompromised or improved performance but generally capital cost—that is, yielding not diminishing but expanding returns to investments in efficiency.

SUMMARY: Applying a new theory of form and structure to real world problems of energy generation and storage.

SUMMARY: Lotus is an environmental sensor network that empowers citizens by giving them direct access to information about the state of their local, and global, marine environment.

SUMMARY: Microbial power systems: Generating clean energy from dirt

SUMMARY: This paper proposes construction of pilot networks of platforms moored to the continental shelf of Alaska to form sea bridges/archipelagos for shelter, hunting and denning. (Fig. 1 and 2). Placed by ship, the platforms would use remotely operated vehicle (ROV) technology to submerge during the current complete winter freezes and surface during the iceless summers.

SUMMARY: Imagine a shimmering, energy-producing caravanserai, the Carbon Balancing Act Road Show. This traveling event appears as tensile structures on trailer rigs, animated by a play of light, transforming public spaces and parking lots with the message: we live within a dynamically-balanced, interconnected system.

This project sets forth a revolutionary concept for the design of an entirely new economic model for a region that has been despoiled by extractive industries. Dr. John Todd’s vision is inextricably bound to a set of highly advanced ecological design principles that he developed.

SUMMARY: Interra is a new economic infrastructure, piggybacking on the credit card interchange, for comprehensively facilitating such alignment of aspirations with economic activity. It creates an ecosystem and virtuous circle among conscious consumers, the businesses and products that reflect their values, and the causes they want to support.

SUMMARY: While magnetic levitation (MagLev) systems have been well established for human transport, the concept of material transport using similar technology has been under-investigated. Establishing a Small-Diameter Vacuum-Enhanced MagLev (SDVEML) system would allow for virtually limitless transportation of materials, at significantly lower costs.

SUMMARY: This proposal, spearheaded by Ms. Ilana Meallem, Mr. Mazen Zoabi and the Center for Women's Health Studies and Promotion at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU), is an ideal candidate for the Buckminster Fuller Challenge, fulfilling as it does the Challenge criteria.

SUMMARY: This design science solution offers an innovative method for projecting data on a half-sphere (full-dome) Geoscope. The intent is to realize the Geoscope vision of R.