Buckminster Fuller was a comprehensive anticipatory design scientist by his own definition.
What exactly that meant and how he defined it changed constantly over the course of his
lifetime as he sought to make the world work for 100 percent of humanity as he described
it.
What he wanted to do was to figure out what all of the problems were within the world
in his time and how those problems might evolve over time and what sort of technologies might
be available that could address those problems in a way that would make the world sustainable
at every level; from the environment as a whole to individual lives and the ability
of individuals in society to thrive.
He often overshot as far as his ideas were concerned in terms of coming up with inventions
that were improbable at best and required materials, required mechanisms that would
take a very long time to come about that only in our own world, in our own time have become
feasible.
But in so doing he set a sort of a template, I believe, for thinking comprehensively and
thinking in terms of the patterns that exist between people and problems and the ways in
which solutions need to come from far enough in the future to be able to genuinely address
those problems holistically and to be able to do so in time and through time.
Buckminster Fuller had many ways over his lifetime that he applied his key invention,
the one for which he’s best known, the geodesic dome.
Possibly his most unexpected use of the dome was initially as an outdoor planetarium in
which you would be able to see your relationship to the planet by looking out at the stars
through cutouts of the continents but which became as he became more ambitious a globe
that would be 200 feet in diameter placed in the East River in view of the United Nations
that would be completely clad in lighting that would allow for visualizations of everything
from climate, to where warfare was taking place, to global migration patterns.
And the idea was this sort of massive visualization that the United Nations could use in order
to be able to understand what was happening in the world and the impact of decisions being
made within the UN.
This never happened.
He lobbied for it for decades and it was never feasible largely because there were not the
sort of data streams that would have been required and also because he was asking for
an enormous amount of money for a very large and unwieldy structure to be placed in the
East River.
Today it is incredibly easy to imagine how those data streams might be drawn from sensor
networks that are ubiquitous throughout the world making use of the Internet.
One might initially dismiss the idea of the geoscope as pointless given that everybody
on their computer or on their smartphone is able to see any sort of visualization.
We live in a culture that is very much oriented toward these visualizations.
Yet the problem is that each of us does so in a way that is very much a matter of how
we navigate that global set of patterns, that global set of data that comes through the
sensor networks.
As a result we end up each of us seeing the world in our own way and not really being
able to communicate with each other.
The idea of the geoscope was quite the contrary to have a commons by which everyone could
come together as Fuller envisioned it in his time that body being the United Nations.
But today given the ease with which we could achieve what the geoscope did both in terms
of data feed and also in terms of visualization of that data it becomes something that could
happen in any city and that I believe needs to happen in every city.
What I foresee is a future in which every city has what I call a data park which is
a park that is at scale the shape and contour of the city itself.
A public space during the daytime covered in grass where people go and do what you would
do in a park.
But at night where the ground is illuminated with colored LEDs, all of which are networked
in a way that becomes possible to visualize the data of the city; microclimates and how
the interact, energy usage and how that may correlate with the possibility of harvesting
energy through solar and other alternate energy sources, gentrification.
All of these issues that we tend only to see through the narrow confines of what interests
us and our own beliefs by way of our own computer or smartphone for this to be a public space
in which people can come together and see that data for their city while simultaneously
seeing a geoscope in miniature that maps the same data for the entire planet.
Then therefore creates interrelationship between the place in which you live and the planet
as a whole.
To me this data park becomes a way in which to take the spirit of Buckminster Fuller and
this idea that we need to understand the world through pattern recognition but it has to
happen collectively in order for collective action to take place.