The Legacy of Bucky Fuller

"The annual Buckminster Fuller Design Challenge awards $100,000 to a visionary design project, one that can be inserted into a failing system to do no less than accelerate the transition to an equitable and sustainable future. In his book on the condition of man, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, Fuller wrote that: "If you are in a shipwreck and all the boats are gone, a piano top buoyant enough to keep you afloat makes a fortuitous life preserver. But this is not to say that the best way to design a life preserver is in the form of a piano top." Today more than ever, it has become clear that much of the technology, design, and systems in use in our everyday lives?-?from our transportation system and our power grid to the way we build our homes and think about sanitation ?-?is a sea of piano tops. Fuller called for a different approach to problem solving, which he called "comprehensive anticipatory design science," that utilized systems thinking and scientific rigor with faithful reliance on nature's underlying principles."