5 The Evoluting Contact Products
6.1Phase 5. Usually phrased as ’end’ products - there are in effect no end products but only the contact instruments of industrialization’s human ecology services which are the plug-in or latch-on terminals of service industries, e.g., the telephone, transportation and and other communication units, the motel (bathroom and bed) - and eventually the world-around environ control service unit. (R. B. Fuller, 1964)
6.2 Each phase of the program interweaves with all other phases. We have already dealt then with various aspects of the ’evoluting contact products’. In the evolution of the tool towards the industrial tool complex, control and functional use is vested in the remotely linked ’contact’ instrument. In the development of the service industry, the ’visible’ terminals are various facilities which allow man to ’plug-in’ to large ’invisible’ service networks.
6.3 In directing our present discussion, therefore, towards the fact that there are no end products within the overall process, we may further clarify various aspects of our design direction.
6.4 The use of the term ’end product’ to refer to items of industrial manufacture implies a lack of recognition of the essentially dynamic and regenerative cycling nature of the industrialized production process. End product implies permanent finality and, even if this were theoretically possible, it would not apply to products which are:
6.5 a) Wholly temporal ’use’ configurations in a particular consumption cycle, e.g., the metals forming an auto, which is being driven today, may be reprocessed and refunctioning in a refrigerator six months hence. b) Component parts of an overall system only with no use value detached from the system, e.g., the domestic telephone hand set is not an end product but only the specific local end of a wire through which one ’taps in’ to the telephone network.
6.6 We might possibly use the term for the handcrafted products of earlier periods, when such items as were produced represented large amounts of directly applied human energy and the use of relatively scarce, and often ’precious’ raw materials. In such periods, the difficulty of securing a fine cutting edge or really sharp point would make a good knife or a fine needle, objects to be treasured, carefully preserved - and even passed on to the next generation as accummulated wealth. Such products were, in a sense, ’end’ products. Their manufacture took a long time, and, as embodying much direct human labor and individual life experience, they were unique, irreplaceable and made for ’permanent’ use.
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6.8 PRIMARY USE-LIFE OF PRODUCTS
6.9 Washing machines and ironers Utensils and galvanized wire Hand power tools Automobiles Other domestic and small commercial equipment Refrigeration equipment Construction and related equipment Air conditioning and ventilating equipment Mining, quarrying, & lumbering equipment General purpose industrial equipment Metal working equipment Agricultural machinery Railroad equipment Ships
6.10 Average Useful Life in Years
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6.12 There has typically grown around such products traditional associations of intrinsic value, and particular attitudes of aesthetic response, which are related to the above factors. In architecture, slogans like ’truth to materials’, ’form follows function’ etc. are also traceable to such earlier attitudes.
6.13 With the advent and swift development of industrialized mass production, almost all of these earlier traditional attitudes to material products became irrelevant when applied to the goods produced by the machine. For the first time, man could produce objects of common utility in huge numbers. New tools, made of new alloys, had a precision and use-life far in advance of any previous handmade product and were produced in a fraction of the time - with relatively little direct investment of human energy. When manufacturing technologies went over into the ’invisible’ ranges of electrical and other radiation energies, this also had its effect on the ’end’ product. For example, the electric light bulb is a contact instrument for ’tapping in’ to remotely generated energies, and has little or no ’intrinsic value’ apart from its direct function.
6.14 Previous attitudes to materials, forms and functions were no longer adequate to a situation in which with new alloy and chemical strengths ’function’ relative to ’material’ and form, was no longer accessible to the unaided vision. The fine steel cable might look more fragile than a heavy iron bar but was many times stronger and more efficient. Truth to materials could no longer be tenable when it became possible to produce materials to any particular strength or ’truth’ required. There is no real ’value’ divisions between naturally occurring ’organic’ materials and those synthesized by man, when it is realized that organic or synthetic materials are both local rearrangements of the basic elements inventory.
6.15 No accummulations of machine products could really be considered wealth when the industrial cycle of manufacture–performance–re-use–improved performance provided a constantly evoluting product at lower costs and higher performance with each successive cycle. The primary use-life of products tended to shorten and many shifted over into being expendable after a single use.
6.16 The real nature of these fundamental changes in the production of ’wealth’ - the shift from an agriculturally based margin survival of some to industrial abundance for all - is still not wholly understood today. As industrialization developed, conflicts over the ’accounting’ systems for the accumulating wealth and its increasing inequality of distribution led to the various political and ideological blocs. Lack of insight and accompanying inability to ’handle’ the swiftly developing phases of industrialization brought on the ’crashes’ and ’depressions’ of the between-the-wars periods with their various remedial action programs. Gold, a typical ’symbolic’ example of pre-industrial wealth which no longer had any functional validity, was also abandoned as a currency backing during this period - with much mystification and reluctance. Significantly related, however, to this obsolescence of one wealth standard by man was the unobtrusive acquisition of another - the completion of the atomic table of 92 elements in 1932. At the time when society seemed to be going off the rails, the ’invisible’ inventory of man’s real wealth resource - his ordered and accumulated knowledge - was given an extraordinary increment!
6.17 With the coming of automation, industrial productivity itself loses its main role as primary activity in society. The production and distribution of goods no longer assumes prior importance. It is now accomplished with less energy and material investment, less direct involvement of human beings, and becomes a relatively effortless machine procedure. 107
6.18 The ’evoluting contact products’ produced in abundance and variety by the machine have no intrinsic value other than their immediate use value in subtending human function. Material ’wealth’ may now be created with such ease that even the notion of these being a constant ’surplus’ to normal requirement may also be considered ’normal’.
6.19 Man has, however, only recently emerged from the ’marginal’ survival of pre-industrial society which was based on the economics of scarcity and where manufactured products were unique and irreplaceable. He cannot quite become used to potentially enormous wealth of an automated industrial society in which the only unique and ’irreplaceable’ element is man himself.
6.20 This is one of the main points about automation and is worth re-emphasizing. In a ’margin survival’ society, objects, products, resources etc. tended to have more importance in sustaining the societal group than the individual, man. (Hence our still laggard pre-occupation with wealth as property owning, i.e. owning the means of survival.) Man was, in a sense, used most prodigally in order that the idea of man might survive. The material object was unique - man was expendable. Value resided in objects, systems, properties as ’ideal’ and ’enduring’, therefore, external to individual man.
6.21 Now through developed industrialization, the object, may be produced prodigally - the product is expendable - only man is unique. In fully automated process the only unique resource input is information - that which programs the machine production performance. The products are non-unique and expendable, i.e. as are the machines and the materials acted upon by the machines. The machines may be re-made exactly by other machines which contain the necessary information input. The materials are the basic physical elements temporally structured into various use combinations by acting upon them with information: they are recycled and restructured through various uses by further information. The only part of the whole process which is non-expendable and ’unique’ is man - individual man and his impounding of the accumulated knowledge of all men.
6.22 It may be underlined that one major block in our understanding centers around this lack of insight into the nature of technological process. In ’tool evolution’ we have traced the regenerative performance cycle. Technology ’does more with less’ to the point where in micro-miniaturization the actual product is almost invisible. The fundamental trend in industrialization relative to society is not simply to increase the material paraphernalia of living but rather to progressively dematerialize such means. The trend is, therefore, towards the ultimate ephemeralization of all man’s environment control facilities - to render them invisible. This means taking less of man’s life time, life energy, and space to deal with the day-to-day ’survival’ requirements of controlling, monitoring and arranging the material environment to his necessary purpose.
6.23 As technology progressively ’compacts’ the means for such environmental control through increased performance per unit of invested resource, it also enormously expands man’s potential - his access to, awareness of, and capacity to use life itself, in full interaction with his past heritage and presently evolving world society.
6.24 Many of those professedly concerned with what they view as ’a growing dichotomy of spiritual and material values’, signally fail to appreciate this inherent trend. Their dichotomy tends to be internal, subjective and at some remove from reality. In describing
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6.26 a visit to a learned colleague, one author recently gave a good illustration of such an at- titude, -
6.27 ’He sat in an air-conditioned study. Behind him was a high fidelity phono- graph and record library that brought him the choicest music of three cen- turies. On the desk before him was the microfilm of an ancient Egyptian papyrus that he had obtained by a routine request through his university. He described a ten-day trip he had just taken to London, Paris and Cairo to confer on recent archaeological discoveries. When asked what he was working on at the moment, the professor said, An essay for a literary journal on the undiluted evils of modern technology.’72
6.28 An important aspect of the world industrialization is that in the diffusion of its pro- ducts, particularly those which are the ’contact instruments’ of the world communications network, common cultural attitudes and values are also diffused.
6.29 Culture may be defined as a distinctive pattern of living, whose shared components are attitudes, values, goals, institutions and modes of communication. These would also include the ’style’ of living as influenced by those man-made environment control elements and products in common usage.
6.30 The important ’reality’ of our present world social and cultural situation is that a world society has been brought into being, and an international culture now exists - albeit, at many different stages of growth and development. It has been pointed out that though politically the world has never been so sharply divided, culturally it has never presented it has never presented such an unified appearance.
6.31 This has been brought about by various factors all of whom are, in one way or another, aspects of the development of man’s world ’services’ network. They are the pro- duct of developed industrial technologies and are dependent on the evoluting contact instru- ments, support networks and terminal service facilities for their maintenance. We may sum- marize some of these factors as follows:-
6.32 1. The growth of international scholarship and of the organs of scholarly exchange - the transnational conferences, radio and tele-casts, journals and papers, and the large- scale world cooperative ventures, such as the International Geophysical Year, etc. The increased mobility and migration of scholars is also evident and important, and the role of the various growing world organizations.
6.33 2. The expansion of swift global transportation, a) carrying around the world the diverse products of mass production technology pro- vides common cultural artifacts which engender, in turn, shared attitudes in their requirements and use. That the transistor radio, T. V. aerial and the ’soft drink’ are more widely distributed and more swiftly encultured than ’common ideals of jus- tice, respect for human values and institutions’ etc., is not evidence that the latter are less communicable but that much less attention and energy has been put into their circulation.
6.34 72’Self Renewal’ by John W. Gardner, Published by Harper and Row. 1964. 109
6.35 b) The common service facilities and standards of transportation terminals, air- craft and their associated equipment, plus their support systems of hotels, motels, restaurants and other services. The travellers, or inhabitants of any of the world’s large cities - London, New York, Tokyo, Paris etc. - is more likely to find him- self culturally at home in any of them than he may feel in the rural parts of his own country. The availability of the international cultural environment which sus- tains him will be more evident. c) The generally increased mobility of man. We may discern in world tourism a developing ecological pattern of man which is part of a new international education process. This is likely to be further accelerated with the spread of automation and the new availability of ’non-work’ time. Apart from the cultural diffusion and interchange which this occasions, we find associated with it a renewed interest in man’s past cultural heritage, and in the natural environment. The large-scale restoration of historical sites, of whole towns and areas, are expansions of the ’museum without walls’ concept, which is likely to go forward in a greatly in- creased manner, with man’s dual expanding interests in both his past and emerg- ing future.
6.36 3. The communications revolution, whose latest benchmark is the world orbiting com- satellite, diffuses and interpenetrates local cultural traditions, and generates com- monly shared cultural experience in a manner which is unprecedented in human his- tory. Within the world communications service network, the related media of radio, television, cinema, with magazines, newspapers and a range of allied products, vir- tually are a common cultural environment sharing and transmitting man’s symbolic needs and their expression on a world scale. Should their standards and values appear, to some, to fall below that of previous and local traditions, it may be suggested that little attention has been paid towards understanding of the nature of this development - or towards eliciting appropriate standards for such media within the educational framework. By and large, this cultural evolution has proceeded with little positive leadership, understanding or encouragement from those concerned with the aca- demic maintenance of cultural values and standards.
6.37 Through the above trends, and many others which have not been touched upon, there is demonstrated a growing awareness of the essential unity of man and his society, the con- tinuity and interdependence of his cultural heritage, and the viability of a world fusion of cultures contributing to an overall increase and richness in human civilization.
6.38 WORLD - AROUND ENVIRON CONTROL SERVICE UNITS
6.39 In reviewing the present stage of the world services networks, we can see that the most advanced technologically are transportation and communication. The most laggard and least developed area of environment control still remains human dwelling facilities. The contrast has now become so glaring as to be insupportable,
6.40 ’We (now) see millions of glistening metallic T.V. antenna sprouting above the roofs of filthy, festering, bathroomless, firetrap living shacks - the world
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6.42 YEAR 500,000 BC 20,000 BC 300 BC 500 BC
6.43 Required time to travel around the globe A few hundred thousand years A few thousand years A few hundred years A few tens of years
6.44 Means of transportation Human on foot (over, ice bridges) On foot and by canoe Canoe with small sail or paddles or relays of runners Large sail boats with oars, pack animals, and horse chariots
6.45 Distance per day(land) 15 miles 15-20 miles 20 miles 15-25 miles
6.46 Distance per day (sea or air) 20 by sea 40 miles by sea 135 miles by sea
6.47 Potential state size None A small valley in the vicinity of a small lake Small part of a continent Large area of a continent with coastal colonies
6.48 Communications Word of mouth, drums, smoke, relay runners, and hand printed manuscripts prior to 1441 A.D. The Gutenberg 1441 printing press The rapid print 1863 newspaper press
6.49 THE RELATIVE SIZE OF THE WORLD
6.50 15,00 AD -1840 AD
6.51 The best average speed of horse drawn coaches on land and sailing ships at sea was approximately 10 m.p.h.
6.52 Man on foot = 3 mph
6.53 7,000 6,000 5,000 4,000 3,000 2,000 1,000 BC AD 100 200 300 400 500 600 700
6.54 5,000 years of villages & towns and then 5,000 years (300BC-1800AD) in which towns slowly evolved into cities, and then into metropolises.
6.55 Rome was the only metropolis of over 1,000,000 people from this date forward until 1800 AD.
6.56 1850
6.57 Steam locomotive 65 m.p.h. which averaged 36 m.p.h.
6.58 Adapted from: (1) International Industrial Development Center Study. Stanford Research Institute (2) Science and the Future of Mankind World Academy of Art and Science)
6.59 SHRINKING OF OUR PLANET BY MAN’S INCREASED TRAVEL AND COMMUNICATION SPEEDS AROUND THE GLOBE
6.60 1,500 AD 1900 AD 1925 1950 1965 A few years A few months A few weeks A few days A few hours Big sailing ships (with compass), horse teams, and coaches Steam boats and railroads (Suez and Panama Canals) Steamships, transcontinental railways, autos, and airplanes Steamships, railways, auto jet and rocket aircraft Atomic steamship, high speed railway auto, and rocket-jet aircraft 20-25 miles Rail 300-900 miles 400-900 miles Rail 500-1,500 Rail 1000-2000 175 miles by sea 250 miles by sea 3,000-6000 air 6000-9500 air 408,000 air Great parts of a continent with transoceanic colonies Large parts of a continent with transoceanic colonies Full continents & Transocean Commonwealths The Globe The globe and more
6.61 The Bell 1876 telephone The Marconi 1895 telegraph First commercial 1920 radio broadcast National 1950 Television Transcontinental T.V. with the introduction of Early Bird satellite
6.62 WORLD AS TRAVEL TIME DECREASES
6.63 1930
6.64 1950’s Propeller aircraft averaged 300-400 m.p.h.
6.65 1960’s Jet passenger aircraft averaged 500-700 m.p.h.
6.66 17,000 2,000 XB-70 Jet supersonic 1,500 Jet 1,000 500 First flight across the Atlantic 100 50 Automobile 25 Steam locomotive Horse Coach 5 Carevel=5 mph. This toned area represents population growth
6.67 800 900 1000 1100 1200 1300 1400 1500 1600 1700 1800 1900 20 40 60 80 1965
6.68 Rome’s population declined by 30,000 Bubonic plague wiped out 1/4 of Europe’s population For the first time in history it began to be safe for men to live in large cities because of advances in medicine and sanitation. Life was made more secure and comfortable by the Industrial Revolution & mechanized farming
6.69 dl. Hugo Boyko, editor. (Issued by W. Junk, The Hague, 1961. (3) Change/ Challenge/ Response. Office of Regional Development, Albany N.Y. 1964.
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6.71 around. Thus we find ourselves continually advancing in domestic technology, but only as the second hand gadgetry, by produced by the cast off segments of the weaponry industry. ’73
6.72 Within this phase of the program, a prime priority should be, therefore, the design, development, prototyping and field testing of environment control units. This would include the design of the services, maintenance, parts inventories and transportation performances required to make such rentable and fully maintained service operable around the world.
6.73 Little of the information required for such designing will be found in standard archi- tectural works but will require the review, analysis and compilation of information from many different areas of advanced technology.
6.74 Close examination and analysis of the ’network’ principles of the present world services of airways, telecommunications will be a valuable guide. A wealth of material may be found, also, in the technical and logistical operations manuals of various naval, air and land services - particularly those concerned with operations in the polar regions, under sea exploration and the other ’inhospitable’ and extreme environ conditions.
6.75 The scientific and technological knowledge, the detailed generalized systems in- formation, the performance characteristics of the metals, plastics and the various advanced aircraft and airspace components etc. is freely available in the libraries and technical in- formation services of most nations. All that is required is the requisite design initiative to engage with the enterprise!
6.76 We have touched upon many of the varied aspects of human dwelling requirements in the various chapters of our discussion. Students are recommended particularly to look closely at the ’Universal Requirements for a Dwelling Advantage of R. B. Fuller’. 74 They will find this the most comprehensive attempt to list every requirement, and meet most contingencies, likely to occur to man in relation to dwelling. As a working schedule it methodically lists, in detail, the whole concept of advanced dwelling as an energy controlling valve, operating on a frequency modulation basis; the structure enclosure performance re- quirements; analysis of the internal mechanical and other energy exchange services; the communication aspects of dwelling; and its collective, global performance as a world service facility. The ’Universal Requirements’ schedule also assumes, -
6.77 ’that the design level of each progressive model will be obsolete within a period of somewhere between 10 and 15 years, and, therefore, that the older apparatus will be continually withdrawn from circulation, the ma- terials to be scrapped and reprocessed, with appropriate addition from new resources, into advanced mechanical standards - thus instituting a world industry which will continually reprocess the dwelling facilities of the world’s people. ’75
6.78 73’Ideas and Integrities" by R. Buckminster Fuller, Published by Prentice Hall, 1963.
6.79 74Document Two (1964) ’The Design Initiative’ - R. Buckminster Fuller
6.80 75Flow Diagram into Tomorrow - R. Buckminster Fuller, unpublished, 1941-42.
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6.82 As we have discussed certain of the ’cultural’ aspects of technological development, it may be useful to comment upon these relative to dwelling. Traditionally, a great deal has been made of the cultural barriers to change in this area. The home/family dwelling is indicated as the basic unit of enculturation most resistant to those changes in form, in equipment or services which might disturb or invalidate its social core function. It is suggested that certain forms are culturally embedded, and may not, therefore, be altered, that various certain local usage must be designed for.
6.83 In establishing design criteria for a dwelling which would be globally operative, it is obvious that such cultural qualifications be treated respectfully. Designs should be flexible enough to accommodate specific cultural preference. Insufficient attention is generally given in dwelling design to the cultural and social functions of space, privacy, acoustic levels, etc.
6.84 However, it should be noted that the strength of many apparent cultural barriers, to the swift acceptance of the products of advanced technology, do not appear to be as measurable strong as they are traditionally stated. Electricity, the telephone, transistor radio, and television could not be more eagerly adopted wherever they have been made available; even in the most traditionally oriented or primitive cultures. We may note also that, in the so-called advanced cultures, a great number of technological services have been incorporated within the family dwelling or, have displaced home functions to external agencies, in the term of one generation. In the same period, one such traditionally hallowed ’core’ function - the open fireplace, culturally embedded as the home ’hearth’ focus, has disappeared - only to reappear in a more technically refined guise as an optional ’luxury’ extra!
6.85 One may state, then, in relation to long-term design and performance criteria, that cultural characteristics tend to variable, local and plastic. Much less than one generation may suffice for gross cultural change. On the other hand, physical characteristics and acquirements are relatively invariant, universal and fixed for many generations. Generally, we need to recognize that the world environ control service unit must be designed so as to accommodate those needs of individual man beyond the physically measurable - for the fullest range of individual realization - as allowing any kind of living within its adjustable and controllable domain.
6.86 Against this concept of the scientifically designed environment control embodying the fullest and most flexible individual control, we have the ’market oriented’ standard of the traditional craft builder and prefabricator. His plea has been that ’fully industrialized housing’ will destroy individual living and produce conformity. The average handcrafted or pre-fabricated dwelling in most of our presently ’advanced’ suburbs are an object lesson in cabinned conformity and mass design, tailored to a mythical consumer.
6.87 Environment control facilities of the most fully advantaged design may now, in terms of available automated production technology, be produced, not only in the vast numbers required, but with any requisite variety of major or sub-assembly configuration, ’finish’, alternate and flexible space, atmospheric, communications and energy controls.
6.88 The availability to all men of the high standards of living now only enjoyed by less than half of the human family is perfectly feasible through our present level of scientific
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6.90 and technical knowledge. It is the central task of the World Design Science Decade to design the ways and the means through which this may be accomplished. No mandate is required, other than personal initiative, self-organized and self-coordinated on a world around basis.
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6.92 READINGS LIST
6.93 Phase 5. The Evoluting Contact Products
6.94 Buckminster Fuller. John McHale. George Braziller, Inc., 1962.
6.95 Continuities in Cultural Evolution. Margaret Mead. Yale University Press, 1964.
6.96 The Culture Consumers. Alvin Toffler. The MacMillan Company, 1964.
6.97 Economic Man, Vol. I and II. C. Reinold Noyes. Columbia University Press, 1948.
6.98 International Cooperation and You. Louis Verniers. Union of International Associations, Document Nr. 12, U.I.A. Publication Nr. 177, 1962.
6.99 The Nature of the Non-Western World. Vera M. Dean. New American Library, 1957.
6.100 The Next Development in Man. L. L. Whyte. Mentor Books, 1961.
6.101 The Next Generation. Donald N. Michael. Random House Inc., 1963.
6.102 The Next Hundred Years. Harrison Brown, James Bonner and John Weir. Viking Press, 1957.
6.103 No More Second Hand God. R. Buckminster Fuller. Southern Illinois University Press, 1963.
6.104 Of Time, Work & Leisure. Sebastian de Grazia. The Twentieth Century Fund, 1962.
6.105 The Peace Race. Seymour Melman. Ballantine Books, Inc., 1961.
6.106 Report on the World Social Situation. United Nations. United Nations Publication, 1957.
6.107 The Scientific Approach to Ethics. Anatol Rapoport. Science, 125:796, 1957.
6.108 Scientific Basis for World Civilization. Leo J. Baranski. The Christopher Publishing House, 1960.
6.109 Stages of Economic Growth. W. W. Rostow. Cambridge University Press, 1960.
6.110 The Strategy of Persuasion. Arthur E. Meyerhoff. Coward-McCann Inc., 1956.
6.111 The Study of Culture at a Distance. Margaret Mead (ed.). University of Chicago Press, 1953.
6.112 Technology and Social Change. Eli Ginzberg (ed.). Columbia University Press, 1964.
6.113 Tectonic Sketch Map of North America. William Taylor Thom, Jr., Ph.D., D. Sc. 1959.
6.114 Understanding Media. Marshall McLuhan. McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1964.
6.115 World Communications. UNESCO Publications Center, 1964.
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