The Ten Year Program

The fourth of the six World Design Science Decade documents (1965), by John McHale for the World Resources Inventory at Southern Illinois University. It is the program's work plan — it takes the five-phase structure announced in Document 2 and specifies what each phase actually studies and builds. Part of the digitized WDSD series.

What it argues

The document is structured as the five two-year phases of the ten-year world retooling program:

1. World Literacy re World Problems. Making the state of the planet legible to everyone — the informational precondition for design. Its appendices introduce the Geoscope (a large-scale spherical world display for making global data comprehensible) and the "Big Alphabets" of world resources and trends.
2. Prime Movers and Prime Metals. An inventory of the energy converters ("prime movers") and the critical metals on which industrial capability rests.
3. Tool Evolution. The historical trajectory of tools and technology — how humanity's capability compounds as tools evolve toward doing more with less.
4. The Service Industries. The shift of the economy toward services and information, including an appendix toward a World University — education reconceived at planetary scale.
5. The Evoluting Contact Products. The evolving products and artifacts through which people actually meet their needs — the material output of the whole retooling.

Throughout, McHale documents world resources, human trends, and needs with extensive charts, tables, and maps — the data apparatus that makes the program concrete.

Why it matters

Document 4 is the WDSD program's operational blueprint — the most explicitly planned and data-dense of the Phase I documents, and the fullest expression of John McHale's role as the program's systematic researcher and information-designer. Its ideas — the Geoscope, world literacy about world problems, a World University, tool evolution toward ephemeralization — are the working machinery behind the World Game. It shows the WDSD not as manifesto but as a staged, resource-accounted engineering program.

About the source

Originally published 1965 by the World Resources Inventory, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. Digitized here in full via the codexis pipeline (OCR → LaTeX → WikiJS Markdown), preserving the original wording and typography; typeset-PDF and EPUB editions and the original searchable scan sit beside the page. Note: the original is heavily illustrated with charts and maps; those visuals are preserved in the typeset PDF and the searchable scan.

See Also

• Comprehensive Thinking (Document 3) — the comprehensive-thinking method this program operationalizes
• Comprehensive Design Strategy (Document 5) — the next document, opening Phase II
• Inventory of World Resources, Human Trends and Needs (Document 1) — the resource inventory this program schedules into phases
• John McHale (John McHale) — sole author of this document; the program's information-designer

Sources

• world-design-science-decade-document-4 (raw pointer)
• document-4-the-ten-year-program/index.md — the full transcribed text (with typeset PDF + EPUB + searchable scan)