Inspirations
Buckminster Fuller
"You have to make up your mind either to make sense or to make money, if you want to be a designer."
Architect, engineer, mathematician, poet, cosmologist, philosopher -- Fuller's many careers, callings and fields of activities are too numerous to list. A universalist and global thinker; he framed the explanations of his work in terms of the entire universe and coined the term "Spaceship Earth". He realised that by examining global problems in the context of the whole system -the whole planet - we have the best chance of identifying large-scale trends that would allow us to anticipate the critical needs of humanity.
He lived his life as an experiment, to discover what an individual might be able to do effectively on behalf of all humanity. During this "experiment" he was awarded 25 US patents, authored 28 books, received 47 honorary doctorates in the arts, sciences, engineering and the humanities, received dozens of major architectural and design awards, created work which can be found in permanent collections of museums around the world.
He devoted his time to the development of "Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science", which attempted to anticipate and resolve the problems of all humanity through technology and the principles of science, and using less resources.
Buckminster Fuller is best known for the invention of the geodesic dome. In fact, he developed and patented an idea that had been initiated some thirty years earlier, by engineer, Walter Bauerfield. The geodesic dome is the lightest, strongest and most cost-effective structure to have ever been designed. The dome is able to cover more space without internal supports than any other enclosure, and becomes proportionally stronger and lighter, the larger it is. Fuller designed the dome to counter the trend towards resource intensive, expensive housing, and as part of his plan to make adequate shelter available to all humankind. There are now over 300,00 domes in the world, some of them the centrepieces of major world exhibits such as the Epcot Center at Disney World in Florida.
He was also a proponent of renewable energy sources, which he incorporated into his designs. He believed that "there is no energy crisis, only a crisis of ignorance". His research documented that we can produce enough energy for everybody in the world, while phasing all use of fossil fuels and atomic energy.
'Bucky' was a true polymath, of varied learning, although he never actually graduated from college. He was able to breach the academic divides of science and humanities and 'see the bigger picture'; the universal view of global problems. It is this holistic viewpoint that ICIS aims to foster through its interdisciplinary master classes.
For more information on Buckminster Fuller, see www.bfi.org.
