Preface
2R. Buckminster Fuller intentionally worked fifty years ahead of his time. That’s now. Thirteen years after his death, his ideas, discoveries, and inventions offer solutions to many of our most severe worldwide problems. Yet many people are not familiar with him or his work.
3 That isn’t surprising. Born in 1895, he was a child of another era, a time before automobiles, aircraft, radio, television, computers, and moon-walking. But Bucky everybody called him Bucky) grew up, wide awake, right along with those inventions. Most of his contemporaries regarded the rapidly accelerating new technologies in terms of profits and military superiority—as a means of ensuring their survival as an elite ‘‘fittest.’’ But Bucky saw that technology could be used to abolish poverty, hunger, and war by using the world’s resources for the good of all.
4 Politics had not been able to accomplish that, and never would. Only energy-efficient, resource-efficient design could ‘‘make the world work for everyone’’ for the first time in history. In 1927 Bucky started what he called a ‘‘design science revolution’’ to bring this about. He set out to show what one ordinary person could do as a design scientist.
5 Totally committed, and working at a furious pace, Bucky accomplished much in the following fifty-six years. He worked hard right up to his dying day in 1983. But the design science revolution is far from over, and there is a new urgency: It is becoming clear that we are about to find out whether humans will be a success on Earth, or fail as a species. Bucky was optimistic that we could make it, but not that we would.
6 Everything Bucky did was intended to help us succeed. In this book, I introduce some (but not all) of the major ideas, inventions, and discoveries that he developed for our use. Instead of the gee-whiz aspects, I’ve focused on the logic behind his work, and how he nurtured his ideas from paper napkin scribbles to proof-of-concept demonstrations.
7 To me, Bucky’s most important work was as a teacher, though he didn’t like being seen as a gum. To spread his ideas, he wrote twenty-three books, taught hundreds of seminars, and lectured extensively. He insisted that his domes and other inventions were mainly built to demonstrate pure principle at work. He was showing us how to think.
8 My intent is to let his example inspire you to work on the important problems that still must be solved. Bucky certainly left us plenty to work with. —JB