BFI Design Lab
BFI was founded in 1983 to inspire and support new generations of design science innovation. From 2007-17, we ran the globally recognized Buckminster Fuller Challenge, which awarded a prize to support the development and implementation of high potential solutions that “solve humanity’s most pressing problems in the shortest possible time while enhancing the Earth’s ecological integrity.” As BFI approaches its 40th Anniversary, we have launched the BFI Design Lab – a non-profit design studio and accelerator – to support design science solutions addressing a wide range of fundamental needs including biodiversity, climate, food, water, energy, materials, shelter, transportation, health, and education.
The BFI Design Lab focuses on place-sourced bioregional resilience and regeneration as a critical scale to support federated efforts towards planetary thriving. During the 1960s, Buckminster Fuller developed the World Game as a comprehensive peacemaking response to the war games of the time using the best available data analysis, systems modeling, scenario building, computer technology, and information design of its day. In the 2020s, every region in the world needs the best possible decision support to find regenerative pathways for land-use, built environment, infrastructure, energy generation, and economic development in the face of increasing climate, biodiversity, water, food, economic, and other disruptions. The goal of the BFI Design Lab is to invest in this shared capacity in a lean and agile way; co-design with diverse bioregions and local stakeholders from the start; and make an integrated set of data, tools, and processes rapidly and broadly available.
This will enable bioregions to unleash both local and external investment – using new types of nature-aligned models – at the pace and scale required to avoid collapse and rapidly jump to new levels of coherence, health, and resilience. In turn, this will provide a response to the polycrisis that is federated across hundreds of networked, spontaneously cooperating bioregions and will scale up to the required planetary impact with greater opportunities for constant, locally-attuned course corrections in the face of ongoing disruptions during the rest of the century.
The BFI Design Lab is carefully curating a cohort of initiatives meeting the seven criteria below. Some initiatives are being strategically developed by BFI while others are crowdsourced, with the aim of generating cascading benefits for the entire cohort and the planet.
- Comprehensive: demonstrating whole systems thinking and analysis across scales, contexts, and worldviews;
- Anticipatory: proactively tracking critical trends and assessing long-term consequences of proposed solutions;
- Regenerative: working to regenerate and restore living processes into optimal, healthy, thriving relationship;
- Inclusive: celebrating the resilience of diversity within project teams and the communities they are co-designing with in order to promote system-wide health;
- Commons-Based: committing to placing some intellectual property (IP) in the commons and explore commons-based and regenerative economic models;
- Verifiable: able to withstand rigorous empirical testing;
- Achievable: likely to be implemented successfully and broadly adapted within diverse cultural and ecological contexts.
The BFI Design Lab offers multiple types of support:
- A digital spotlight within BFI global networks;
- Membership in the BFI Design Lab’s global cohort, with the ability to interact with other visionary projects in the cohort;
- Structured design science support drawing on decades of global experience;
- Project incubation through non-profit fiscal sponsorship by BFI where helpful;
- Joint fundraising opportunities that can draw on BFI’s institutional track record;
- Longer-term connections to aligned forms of capital through BFI’s investment partners; and
- Open design, open science, open data, and related software and tools as they are jointly developed within the BFI Design Lab’s global cohort.