Buckyverse

Collaborating for Comprehensivity

Proposes 'comprehensivity' — a facility in questioning, conceptualizing, and acting to build an integrated understanding of how the world works and changes — as a response to civilizational fragmentation. It frames a new tradition of inquiry inspired by history's great polymaths and reads Fuller's comprehensive anticipatory design science through a design-cycle lens.

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Collaborating for Comprehensivity

Our civilization is so complex that there is a widespread feeling of fragmentation, disorderliness, and incomprehensibility. How can ordinary citizens like you and me redress these major shortcomings in our social worlds?

Core structure

  • Introducing an idea to better understand our worlds and their peoples
  • The Vision
  • The Benefits
  • What is Comprehensivity?
  • A New Tradition of Inquiry and Action
  • An idea to unify the world

Main ideas

  • Our civilization is so complex that there is a widespread feeling of fragmentation, disorderliness, and incomprehensibility.
  • Learn how the world works… Examine how change is created… Learn how other people think.
  • The aim is to better imagine, assess, and communicate ideas and actions that may improve the operation and regenerativity of our global civilization.
  • Comprehensivity is a facility in questioning, conceptualizing, interpreting, and acting to build a multi-perspectival yet integrated understanding of the world, how it works, and how it changes.
  • The project aspires to develop, democratize, and institutionalize a new tradition of inquiry and action inspired by the great polymaths of history — Aristotle, Archimedes, Zhang Heng, Hypatia, Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen), and others.

Why it matters

The basic design cycle centered on desiderata, intention, and action is just one of many possible design cycles. It is simpler than those in The Design Way, but it captures the essential notion of design responsibility in Fuller's comprehensive anticipatory design science approach — offered as a preliminary gloss for Bucky's design science even while omitting many crucial aspects of his approach.

Sources

fuller-adjacentcomprehensivitydesign-scienceanticipatory-design-sciencepolymathydesign-cycle