World Resources Inventory

The data engine behind the World Game — a systematic attempt to inventory everything Earth has and everything humanity needs.

The World Resources Inventory (WRI) grew from a challenge Buckminster Fuller issued at the International Union of Architects' VIIth Congress in London in July 1961: he asked the world's architectural schools to spend the next decade determining how design could extend resource access from the 40% of humanity then served to 100%, despite declining per-capita metal availability. By 1962, Fuller and John McHale had research underway at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, where Fuller held a research professorship. By 1964 they were operating from an office at 711 South University Avenue.

McHale — a British artist, Independent Group member, and Fuller's principal intellectual partner on the project — directed the WRI day-to-day while teaching design-history courses at SIU. He had first encountered Fuller at Yale in 1955–56. His wife Magda Cordell McHale participated in the inventory work and, after John's death in 1978, continued futures-studies research through Centers for Integrative Studies at SUNY Binghamton and SUNY Buffalo. Teams of SIU students helped compile the data-intensive reports.

The WRI's flagship output was the World Design Science Decade 1965–1975 document series — six reports presented to the IUA proposing "Five Two-Year Phases of a World Retooling Design for Adoption by World Architectural Schools." Document 1 (Inventory of World Resources, Human Trends and Needs, 1963) and Documents 2–3 (The Design Initiative, 1964; Comprehensive Thinking, 1965) were primarily Fuller's work. Document 4 (The Ten Year Program, 1965) and Document 6 (The Ecological Context: Energy and Materials, 1967) were McHale's. Document 5 (Comprehensive Design Strategy, 1967) included Fuller's "Man With a Chronofile" essay. McHale served as series editor throughout.

The WRI was explicitly the research arm for Fuller's World Game: it gathered the resource data — energy, metals, food, water, population, industrial capacity — that the game's simulations required. Fuller's 1971 "World Game Series: Document One" described the game as an "Integrative Resource Utilization Planning Tool," building directly on WRI data. The WRI's intellectual legacy continued through McHale's books (The Future of the Future, 1968; World Facts and Trends, 1972) and through the World Game Institute, founded in 1972 in Philadelphia. The BFI hosts downloadable PDFs of all six WDSD documents.

See Also

• R. Buckminster Fuller — the central figure
• John McHale — co-director of the WRI and WDSD series editor
• World Game — the simulation the WRI was designed to feed
• World Game Institute — the institutional successor
• Fuller's Teaching Career — the SIU context
• Design Science — the methodology the WRI served
• World Design Science Decade Document 1 — the first WDSD publication

Sources

• World Resources Inventory Research