“Because physicists started out with the imaginary, unstable cube as their model instead of the real-world stable tetrahedron, they got into all these imaginary numbers and other complicated and completely unnecessary mathematics. It would be so much simpler if they started out with the tetrahedron, which is nature’s best structure, the simplest structural system in Universe.

(Just as an aside, to remember later when you’re studying physics in school, I want to point out that the tetrahedron is also equivalent to the quantum unit of physics, and to the electron.)”

But Buckminster Fuller does not believe that the cube is the model of reality. The tetrahedron is the smallest unit of volume in spacetime, which Struppi and I have been attempting to name. We are leaning toward a quant.

What if this was a Jamstack site? See A Modest Proposal.

Regenerative Ventures

Out of the Trimtab Space Camp course with the Buckminster Fuller Institute in which we were exploring world building with Tony Patrick, Langdon Roberts, Jeremy Lubman, Elsie Iwase, and I gathered to think about how we could become involved in regenerative ventures. This was our initiative, in which we met weekly to think about how we manifest who we are as a more beautiful world our hearts know is possible. The thought was that architecture grows out of values, principles, and intention.

Quoted by Amanda Joy Ravenhill on RE & CO Radio, Wednesday, October 13, 2021.

This leads to a sense of learned hopelessness: Things are worse than you imagined, and there is nothing you can do about it.

But Buckminster Fuller said, “We are called to be the architects of the future, not its victims.”

The work of Michael Saup explores the unintended consequences of design: Orbis Lumen.

+b (ORBIT) shows Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Map of the earth built from multiple layers of white industrial sugar cubes and illuminated by the complete sequence of all nuclear explosions from 1945 until now. Using the cubes as three-dimensional pixels, +b emphasizes the intimate relationship between information, energy, resources and their impact on society and nature. +b stages the most extreme power released by humankind, irreversibly transforming the atmosphere and igniting the epoch of the nuclear Anthropocene with its application and supposed mastery of atomic power.

The work illustrates how this mastery is really the reiteration of a profound error and the subsequent compounding of that error. We keep on making mistakes. Some of these errors are extraordinarily beautiful and useful, some are terrifyingly destructive with long-term planetary impact, and many are both.

“Tuesday, I had a conversation with Ilaria Forte to discuss our collaboration on the Plenum: A Collective Story of Regeneration. We discussed the possibility of working with Michael Saup to create a Dymaxion map of the Earth, based on his work for Orbis Lumen, with points of light to indicate locations for the stories of regeneration represented by the Design Science Studio.”

The epoch of the nuclear Anthropocene

Edge Effects

It was in the Design Science Studio that I learned about edge effects.

Yesterday, I was thinking about how my life embodies the concept of edge effects. That same day, a book was delivered to our door, Design for the Real World by Victor Papanek.

Today, I was reading these words:

Design for the Real World

Design for Survival and Survival through Design: A Summation

Integrated, comprehensive, anticipatory design is the act of planning and shaping carried on across the various disciplines, an act continuously carried on at interfaces between them.

Victor Papanek goes on to say:

It is at the border of different techniques or disciplines that most new discoveries are made and most action is inaugurated. It is when two differing areas of knowledge are brought into contact with one another that… a new science may come into being.

(Page 323)

Exiles and Emigrés

The Bauhaus spread its ideas because it existed at the boundaries, the avant-garde, the edges of what was thought to be possible, especially as a socialist utopian idea found its way to a capitalist industrial-military complex, where the concept of modernism was co-opted and colonized by globalizing economic forces beyond the control of the individual. Design was the virus that propagated around the world through the vehicle of corporate globalization.

That same design ethic is infecting corporations with a conscience, with empathy, with a process that begins with listening to people. Design is the virus that can spread the values of unconditional love throughout the body of neoliberal capitalism.

Design for the Real World

You have to make up your mind either to make sense or to make money, if you want to be a designer.

— R. Buckminster Fuller

(Page 86)

Design for the Real World

Victor Papanek’s book includes an introduction written by R. Buckminster Fuller, Carbondale, Illinois. (Sadly, the Thames & Hudson 2019 Third Edition does not include this introduction. Monoskop has preserved the following text as a PDF file of images. I have transcribed a portion below.)

Buckminster Fuller on Design

In this book, Victor Papanek speaks about everything as design. I agree with that and will elaborate on it in my own way.

To me the word “design” can mean either a weightless, metaphysical conception or a physical pattern. I tend to differentiate between design as a subjective experience, i.e., designs which affect me and produce involuntary and often subconscious reactions, in contradistinction to the designs that I undertake objectively in response to stimuli. What I elect to do consciously is objective design. When we say there is a design, it indicates that an intellect has organized events into discrete and conceptual inter-patternings. Snowflakes are design, crystals are design, music is design, and the electromagnetic spectrum of which the rainbow colors are but one millionth of its range is design; planets, stars, galaxies, and their contained behaviours such as the periodical regularities of the chemical elements are all design-accomplishments. If a DNA-RNA genetic code programs the design of roses, elephants, and bees, we will have to ask what intellect designed the DNA-RNA code as well as the atoms and molecules which implement the coded programs.

The opposite of design is chaos. Design is intelligent or intelligible. Most of the design subjectively experienced by humans is a priori the design of sea waves, winds, birds, animals, grasses, flowers, rocks, mosquitoes, spiders, salmon, crabs, and flying fish. Humans are confronted with an a priori, comprehensive, designing intellect which for instance has designed the sustenance of life on the planet we call earth through the primary impoundment of Sun energy on Earth by the photosynthetic functioning of vegetation, during which process all the by-product gases given off by the vegetation are designed to be the specific chemical gases essential to sustaining all mammalian life on Earth, and when these gases are consumed by the mammals, they in turn are transformed again by chemical combining and disassociations, to product the by-product gases essential to the regeneration of the vegetation, thus completing a totally regenerative ecological design cycle.

If one realizes that the universe is sum-totally an evolutionary design integrity, then one may be prone to acknowledge that an a priori intellect of infinitely vast considerateness and competence is everywhere and everywhere overwhelmingly manifest.

In view of a number of discoveries such as the ecological regeneration manifest in the mammalian-vegetation interexchange of gases, we can comprehend why responsibly thinking humans have time and again throughout the ages come to acknowledge a supra-human omniscience and omnipotence.

The self-regenerative scenario universe is an a prior design integrity. The universe is everywhere, and continually, manifesting an intellectual integrity which inherently comprehends all macro-micro event patterning and how to employ that information objectively with omni-consideration of all inter-effects and reactions. The universe manifests an extraordinary aggregate of generalized principles, none of which contradict one another and all of which are inter-accommodative, with some of the inter-accommodations exhibiting high exponential levels of synergetic surprise. Some of them involve fourth-power geometrical levels of energy interactions.

The same topic is covered by Anand Giridharadas in Winners Take All and by Amy Westervelt in her podcast Drilled exploring the history of public relations.

We had the privilege of interacting with Vandana Shiva in the Trimtab Space Camp course, focused on regenerative agriculture, offered by the Buckminster Fuller Institute.

Vandana Shiva, a world-renowned environmental thinker, activist, feminist, philosopher of science, writer, and science policy advocate, is the founder of Navdanya Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology in India and President of Navdanya International.

The recipient of many awards, including the Right Livelihood Award, (the ‘Alternative Nobel Prize’) and the Sydney Peace Prize, she has been named among the top five “Most Important People in Asia” by AsiaWeek.

She is a prolific writer and author of numerous books and serves on the board of the International Forum on Globalization, and a member of the executive committee of the World Future Council.

I met Flávia Macêdo in a Trimtab Space Camp course. She invited me to participate in Holoptic – Global collective intelligence platform.

I suggested to the Stop Reset Go team that if we are focusing on connection, this might be a useful approach.

Sallie McFague

The World as God’s Body

I was watching a video in a Trimtab Space Camp on regenerative agriculture featuring Vandana Shiva. She said, “It all begins with food, because food is the currency of life.”

I connected this thought to Sallie McFague, who writes in The World as God’s Body about embodiment and incarnation.

Jesus’ eating stories and practices suggest that physical needs are basic and must be met — food is not a metaphor here but should be taken literally. All creatures deserve what is basic to bodily health. But food also serves as a metaphor of fulfillment at the deepest level of our longings and desires. The Church picked up and developed the second metaphorical emphasis, making eating imagery the ground of its vision of spiritual fulfillment, especially in the eucharist. But just as the tradition focused on the second birth (redemption), often neglecting the first (creation), so also it spiritualized hunger as the longing of the soul for God, conveniently forgetting the source of the metaphor in basic bodily needs. But the aspects of Jesus’ ministry on which we have focused — the parables, healings, and eating stories — do not forget this dimension; in fact, Jesus’ activities and message, according to this interpretation, are embarrassingly bodily. The parables focus on oppression that people feel due to their concrete, cultural setting, as servants rather than masters, poor rather than rich, Gentile rather than Jew; the healing stories are concerned with the bodily pain that some endure; the eating stories have to do with physical hunger and the humiliation of exclusion. None of these is primarily spiritual, though each assumes the psychosomatic unity of human nature and can serve as a symbol of eschatological fulfillment — the overcoming of all hierarchies, the health and harmony of the cosmos and all its creatures, the satiety of the deepest groaning and longings of creation.

(The Meaning of Life in the World Religions, page 296)

Where my testimonial is featured on the Program page for the Design Science Studio, but attributed to Anonymous.

This made me laugh. Actually, I prefer being anonymous.

Or, maybe it is recognizing my limitations. Walter Gropius recognized his own limitations and turned that into an ability to connect with people who filled in the gaps in his capabilities. As an architect, his role was to gather people to fulfill a vision that was far beyond what he could accomplish on his own.

The Hidden History of the Geodesic Dome - Part 3: The Teamwork of Walter Gropius

Where my testimonial is featured on the Program page for the Design Science Studio.

Synergetics on the Web, maintained by Kirby Urner.

Kirby Urner’s site on Synergetics

Lionel Wolberger, member of the Trimtab Book Club.

This New Yorker Magazine article from December 31, 1965 notes the adoption of the proposal for a World Design Science Decade from 1965 to 1975.

The next book for the Trimtab Book Club.

“I think that everybody knows that we are in this incredible inflection point for humanity. And I think that what we don’t appreciate enough is that artists are the angel investors in the future that we want. They just have a different form of capital.”

— Amanda Joy Ravenhill, Executive Director, Buckminster Fuller Institute

(3:10:40)

This quote connects to the Stop Reset Go meeting where Derick Bedzra walked us through the eight forms of capital.

• 8 Forms of Capital
• 8 Forms of Capital and Why They Matter
• Creating Resilient Wealth With The 8 Forms Of Capital

I learned about this book during the orientation meeting for the latest Trimtab Space Camp offered by the Buckminster Fuller Institute focusing on regenerative agriculture.

This idea of family orchards is featured in Rupert Sheldrake’s book, Science and Spiritual Practices: Transformative experiences and their effects on our bodies, brains and health.

The latest Trimtab Space Camp offered by the Buckminster Fuller Institute is focusing on regenerative agriculture.

Buckminster Fuller在麻省理工学院的创意工程实验室正式开始教授 Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science 综合预测设计科学（CADS）。他的实验室将科学方法运用到设计中，在工程师、工业设计师、材料科学家和化学家的精英团队的知识基础上进行创新。

“设计师是一个新兴的艺术家、发明家、机械师、客观经济学家与进化战略家的综合。

富勒创造了“协同学”这样一门学问，其基础概念，是“系统”要大于其组成部分的总和。这也意味着，仅仅考虑孤立的组成部分是无法理解一个特定系统的。简而言之，富勒的协同学主张对系统做整体分析，尤其是对我们的地球以及寄居其上的人类社会来说，更应如此。

巴克明斯特·富勒 ： "进化由许多伟大的革命性事件组成，这些事件的发生完全独立于人类有意识地试图实现它们...我要提醒你们，你们中没有人会有意识地把你们午餐吃的鱼和土豆放到这个和那个特定的腺体里，，以形成毛发、皮肤或类似的东西。你们都不知道自己是如何从7磅长到70磅，然后又长到170磅的... ... 所有这些都是自动完成的，而且一直如此。关于我们在地球上的全部拯救，有很多是自动化的，我现在就想进入这种心态，以便在我们所拥有的短暂时间内发挥作用。"