I'm curious to see that. We might be just basic Zoom today.
No, it was it was great. It's your whole comprehension shifts when you're, you know, looking at things I mean it's, you know through a 60 degree grids
yeah
We're just adding a few more people. We'll get started in a couple of minutes.
No, it was, it was interesting because I realized, you know, we never experienced the 60 degree space. And the only time that ever happened, for me was a Frank Lloyd Wright building in in Bartlesville, Oklahoma.
Ah, interesting.
…which is on a pinwheel design. You know, we're so tuned into this 90 degree world. It is interesting.
Hi, Stephen. Welcome.
Yeah, hello. I'm just on my phone. My wife is operating the mute so. Hi everyone.
Okay. Yeah, we're waiting for Kurt. People are still joining just give me one more minute.
Welcome, Mark.
Thank you, Stewart. How are you doing?
Okay, how are you?
Well, an inventor I work with has just told me he's figured out how to do a solar on a battery and make it in a tile factory. That's $50 a kilowatt hour. Wow. And 40% efficient solar. So that's, well, this capacity, battery and twice the efficiency of solar today's commercial stuff.
Wow. Well, great. Welcome, everybody. This is our monthly last Friday call, connecting some of the broader BFI community. Really glad that you're here. We'll probably have some others joining as we go along. I'm Stuart Cowan. I'm the Executive Director of the Buckminster Fuller Institute (BFI). I joined back in December. I've met some of you over the last few months and it’s great to meet some of the others who are here. And I wanted to just give you an update on BFI. We have a lot of extraordinary things going on: some changes in direction, new possibilities. So let me kind of map where we've been over the last couple of years and then some of the fresh directions that we have at BFI and I'll leave plenty of time for questions. So I'll probably just go about 15 minutes or so. We'll have some some questions and dialogue. And then Mark and Curt—if he joins us—will also then kind of facilitate a broader discussion.
As we think about BFI, a really important focus over the two years before I joined was Regenerosity. It's a phenomenal program. For those of you not so familiar, Regenerosity is applying deep, regenerative thinking, design science thinking to rural—largely rural—regeneration projects in Africa, in East Asia and Latin America. And it's developed about ten critical relationships with projects and also working with foundations to help them understand how to do philanthropy differently in a way that involves more trust, long term relationships, less and less reporting. They've been trying to mentor the projects, build their capacity and also help foundations understand that not every project needs to have a perfectly polished annual report and incredibly detailed application, and so forth. It's a phenomenal program. And we all realized it's kind of coherent all by itself. And, in effect, it's operating as its own nonprofit now. So, technically, it's now a fiscally sponsored project of BFI. That means that we're the overall nonprofit umbrella. But it's essentially a completely independent project. It has full autonomy as long as it doesn't do anything outside the bounds of BFI’s mission and purpose. So I wanted everyone to know that that's really flourishing. And we realized it's really kind of separate from the other main activities of BFI. So we've given it wings and it's off and running and doing very well on its own. And you can always get updates going to the Regenerosity website. And again, I'll take questions on all of this at the end, so I'll just run through some of the updates and then happy to provide any further details.
The second key piece is the Design Science Studio, run by my good colleague, Roxi. Roxi had some personal issues for a year, so she needed to skip a cohort year, but the amazing news is there will be a fresh cohort of the Design Science Studio starting in October. Applications are open. I highly recommend it. I know some of you have gone through the Design Science Studio before—a several-month-long structured process with incredible artists and designers and scientists working in a cross-disciplinary way. In the two years that it ran previously, it was a loose partnership between BFI and Roxi's own company, which is called habRitual. Going forward, Design Science Studio will be a fiscally sponsored project of BFI. Just like Regenerosity, it's going to have its own wings. It's totally independent. It makes its own decisions, runs its own accounting, runs its own activities, but we'll have a nice collegial relationship. As I run through what we're doing now in BFI’s own Design Lab, there'll be all kinds of projects that we’ll want to get Design Science Studio involvement in. And, likewise, we'll be feeding things over to the Studio. And, of course, lots of people participate both in BFI activities and Design Science Studio. So we're pleased to have a nice, loose, collegial relationship going forward.
The third key thing, for many years Buckminster Fuller Institute has offered a fiscal sponsorship program. So that means we just put this service of being an anchor, well run, well organized nonprofit now hitting forty on December 15—which is amazing! Very few nonprofits hit 40, I can tell you that. We're able to offer our track record, our history, our brand. It's a stable context to run funds through, and then we can lend our full 501(c)(3) nonprofit status to a qualified project. So we continue to offer that. And I would say, fairly selectively for new projects, because as we build out the Design Lab—and I'll run through this—many of those projects are a great fit for fiscal sponsorship. And so more and more we really want to focus our fiscal sponsorship on synergetic activities, where these are projects that make a lot of sense for BFI anyway, and further what we're trying to do. And then, of course, that's a great service to offer that can help a new project get off the ground, get that early catalytic donation or grant.
So, the next piece, Dymaxion Store, same as ever—up and running. And then, of course, all the amazing resources online. We did a lot of work towards the end of last year, getting World Design Science Decade documents online. There's just such a wealth of information. So make sure you go into the BFI website and just really dig around. There's just incredible detailed videos, key documents, links to other websites, around every aspect of Buckminster Fuller's work.
Now, one thing that we've paused is events, just because we're launching so much. So I'm excited to begin weaving events back in. Primarily, they were interviews, panels, where we could highlight really interesting people who had a real connection to Fuller. In many cases, we were able to do interviews with people, like Michael Ben-Eli, key collaborator of Bucky’s. So we'll bring those back. We'll have some themes. We might try to do some things around World Game, World Design Science Decade, and so forth. And we'll make those available.
And, of course, we have our ongoing membership program as well. So lots of continuity. And we've decided with the Trimtab Space Camp, that's an incredibly intensive offering. So we're not going to do it in that form, for the time being—especially now that Design Science Studio is kicking back in. That's an amazing alternative way to engage with these ideas. But we'll be exploring ways to reach many, many more people through design science education offerings. So not the Space Camp as it was, but some things that that we'll talk about now.
So instead of one very intensive cohort, over a few months with the Space Camp, we're really excited to announce that we are partnering with a project called Massive Action. So Massive Action is being spun out of globally recognized design agency called the Massive Change Network. This was started by Bruce Mau and Bisi Williams. Bruce Mau is a globally recognized designer. Check out the documentary, it's just M-A-U. I’ll put it in the chat. You can get it on Amazon Prime. Amazing documentary about Bruce's life is a whole systems designer. And the goal of Massive Action is to reach 100 million life-centered designers—holistic regenerative designers who will take action in their communities. There'll be 20 different cities.
…reaching 100 million life-centered designers. There'll be a physical exhibit space. There'll be digital platforms. There'll be ways to get a certification after engaging with the material long enough. And the goal is to really connect people to action in their regions. So it's incredible. It's epic. It's amazing. And BFI will be very, very core to this effort. We'll be designing educational modules. We'll be providing case studies. We're helping to shape the whole initiative. And so the 100 million life-centered designers, we hope, will also be exposed to design science—comprehensive anticipatory design science—and have lively case studies on how it's been applied in the past and the present. And people will then connect to opportunities to work on these projects with amazing impacts. It's an audacious project. But we're excited because it's a channel where we could literally begin to reach certainly hundreds of thousands of people and, over time, well into the millions. And while it's a lot of work, it also means we can reach a scale, more than trying to run very detailed program for 100 people or so at a time. So we're going to focus our resources more on this broader community with other amazing organizations that are co-designing Massive Action.
So that's the first project within what we're calling the BFI Design Lab. This was launched a couple of months ago. And the idea of the Design Lab is to support what we call open innovation (OI) ecosystems. This is an important emerging idea. Over the last 10 years or so, we've heard a lot of talk around open source, Creative Commons—really interesting ideas about how we think about intellectual property, creativity, how to work in community in broader ecosystems, to co-create things and then accelerate their deployment in the world. With the BFI Design Lab, we're totally focused on these open innovation ecosystems. And interestingly, even the National Science Foundation has a major grant solicitation right now to stand up these open innovation, open source ecosystems. So very exciting. We feel like it's something that's been emerging in different ways and different places around the world. And we feel that it's very true to the spirit of Buckminster Fuller, who was always trying to think about reimagining entire industries, like transportation with the Dymaxion car, like cartography with the Dymaxion map, shelter with the geodesic dome. And I think he always had the sense that entire industries needed to transform and that would take huge collaborative efforts. He spoke about the world grid, for instance, which would be a way to collaboratively move electrons—fossil-free electrons—around the world following the availability of wind and solar as the Earth spun around its axis. Parts of that are being built out. But it's a great example of that kind of audacious thinking to say, well, let's focus on meeting a fundamental need for abundant fossil-fuel-free energy. And let's not get too caught up in which company gets to grab and control that first. Let's focus on what we would now call a commons to enable that transformation. So each of the Design Lab projects is not just one company or one nonprofit. It's actually an ecosystem in its own right. It's a creative ecosystem connecting together to achieve a shared set of themes. The first ecosystem, the first project within the BFI Design Lab is Massive Action, a huge educational collaboration—but education leading not just to reflection, but to ways to then connect out to projects, begin to do things, learn with each other, learn regionally, share globally, and get to work. So that's number one.
The second one is Architecture for Planetary Regeneration. So, equally audacious as Massive Action. And, by the way, all of this is on the website. So if you go to the BFI Design Lab on the homepage or the tab up top, you'll see all of these updated—and a little bit of this is breaking news, so you're getting a first hit of it now. But the website will get updated in the next couple of weeks. So you can always go there. Because these projects they're going to keep evolving, there'll be new partners. Some will have a natural lifespan. You do a sprint for a year. Done. Let it go. Some will go for many, many years. So you'll always be able to see kind of this amazing ebb and flow, this matrix of Design Lab activity. So the Architecture for Planetary Regeneration includes a consortium of extraordinary organizations working on restoration and regeneration.
With the Architecture for Planetary Regeneration, we have One Earth, which is a fantastic environmental NGO that has mapped a global safety net for the planet, core areas that we need for biodiversity conservation. They've looked at a systemic transition from conventional agriculture to regenerative agriculture, as well as a systemic transition from fossil fuel to a completely clean-energy-based economy. Another key partner, Open Future Coalition, some of you may know. They're doing amazing work on civic innovation, on mapping solutions inventories, and so forth. The goal of the Architecture for Planetary Regeneration project is a lot like the goal of the World Game, for those of you that know about the World Game. It's a way to work at multiple levels of scale. So zoom in on a particular watershed by a region out to an island, mountain range—whatever that next unit is—out to a continental scale, to planetary scale and move very fluently between these scales that are all entangled. They're all interconnected. No region is isolated, as Bucky recognized. Of course, there's going to be critical trade in things like minerals, which are extremely hard to find in most regions. They have an incredible differentiation around the world, where they're located and plentiful. So you have to figure out, Okay, how are we going to trade in minerals? But you need a way to take amazing geospatial data, understand what's going on in a regional-to-global context, take that solutions inventory that One Earth is developing—Open Future Coalition, Drawdown developed in the past—take that solutions inventory, and play that World Game process. So have stakeholders, have representatives from the community designed together, different winning scenarios for their region that feed into how their neighboring regions, up to planetary scale, might work. So literally, comprehensive anticipatory design science capacity—being able to apply that design science, at any scale, in cooperation with other efforts, working at whatever scale they want to, having the rigorous geospatial data, rigorous solutions inventory, to be able to design scenarios and then bring them to the table as an investment portfolio. So make this very real. So one step beyond the World Game, take the scenario and say, if enough people are voting for it and like this, there may be a set of projects that really should be proposed that have teams behind them, that need financing, and take those to suitable investors and get them funded and make them happen. So we have key partners working on global financial transition partners that have worked with the World Bank and huge financial entities. So we're connecting this all the way from the grassroots of the grassroots and individual farmer just trying to regenerate their land all the way out to How would you connect that with global capital sources that start to have a more regenerative lens? And BFI’s role is really around design science to say, Wow. How can we take this data landscape, the solutions to the story, and build transition scenarios. And build those scenarios, get them funded, make them happen. So that's the second project. Again, it's audacious.
These are the kinds of massive things that Bucky always tried throughout his career. Just to raise the effort, create some energy around it. It doesn't mean suddenly we staff this up year after year. We're just part of the mesh, right. We're working with others to create inspiration. We're trying to get parts of this consortium resource to get the work to happen. It doesn't all have to happen internally at BFI, and we've always been like that. The Buckminster Fuller Challenge was all about shining a spotlight on amazing projects and connecting them up and letting them learn from each other. So in that spirit, we're trying to support these open innovation ecosystems and establish these open knowledge artifacts, design artifacts, iterate really quickly. As Bucky recognized starting in the 1920s—let's be clear, this is pretty extraordinary: in the 1920s—he was recognizing what we now call the polycrisis or the metacrisis. He believed that we were going to run out of fossil fuels, we were going to run out of minerals, we're going to run out of land. And we had to ephemeralize, right. We had to do much, much more with much, much less, and he thought systemically about that in many different sectors. And for the next 50 years, he worked nonstop to try to awaken the world to the sense that we're on this fragile Spaceship Earth, right, this fragile biosphere. There's no operating manual. We've got to figure this out. Time is running out. Time is of the essence. And we're a little bit late, because, you know, Bucky proposed the World Design Science decade from 1965 to 1975. And it would have been great to run all of this back then. But we'll just do it now. So in a sense, we're trying to kind of play with the World Design Science Decade, which was an effort to engage architectural schools around the world to say, We need to think very systematically about water, energy, food, shelter, and how we can thrive within what we now call planetary boundaries.
So Massive Action, Architecture for Planetary Regeneration. Third project: Gaia Consortium. This was actually formally launched this week. This is an effort to apply a new kind of artificial intelligence called Active Inference to planetary regeneration. And I think we're all somewhat terrified at how quickly AI is evolving. There are—let's be clear—there are bad actors. There are nefarious actors right now, that will try to do very, very terrifying things with AI there are others that are happy to let AI help us sort of buy more things we don't need even more quickly or just kind of drift along. There are a handful of efforts to try to apply AI as a guide and a support for the incredibly tough decisions that we're going to have to make to make Spaceship Earth work. So we're betting on this particular effort to apply AI with really, really strong ethical guardrails in a way that just only will ever offer decision support. So it will always be incredibly transparent. Let's offer decision support, so that local communities, regional actors, existing governance systems, can transparently understand the basis for that recommendation at any time. It's not a blackbox AI with some neural net with a million parameters no one can understand. It's AI that is co-created between people on the ground, human experts and the modeling system itself. And it can be one very important assistant co-pilot, as we make these really tough decisions at different levels of scale. So the Gaia Consortium has some extraordinary players. We're one of the four co-founding organizations. We hope to get this resourced quickly. And, again, to me, it's very much what Bucky always imagined would be possible: the Geoscope—this vision for a dome that could flash up regional situations, global situations, help decision makers in real time interact with the information, and Bucky knew there would be a wired internet, there'd be a global basis for distributed intelligence. And it would be very visual. It would be computational. It would involve simulation, gamification, all of these things. So Gaia Consortium is very much in that spirit, and I don't take lightly the risks—lately the risks of engaging with AI. But we can't not engage because they're extremely dangerous things already happening and set loose on the world. So I think it's important to have countervailing, ethically constrained AI. Do battle, honestly, do battle with the other digital beings out there. So that's number three.
Number four, is an extraordinary effort led by The Weather Makers. This is a company based in the Netherlands, for profit, out of a variety of engineering disciplines. They have a vision to work with the Sinai Peninsula in northern Egypt. It's now desertified. Three thousand years ago, it was well vegetated, had plenty of rainfall. And they have determined there are ways to begin to rehydrate, revegetate, bring back more local water cycles. And this would have enormous benefit for the entire Mediterranean Basin, which is drying out. So the the part of the Mediterranean next to the ocean is all drying out. Keeping more precipitation in that basin would be a very good thing. So what they figured out with many colleagues around the world, is that there are these sort of acupuncture points for weather, where if you do the right kinds of ecological restoration, you do the right kinds of efforts to rehydrate the ground, you can actually create regional weather benefits that even start to spring across the planet and help other areas as well. So we're setting up an open innovation ecosystem around large scale ecological restoration, particularly with the lens of water functionality, rehydration, if you will, and The Weather Makers will be a key part of that effort.
The next project, closely related, is working with John Liu. He's a wonderful environmental filmmaker, who started a global network called the Ecosystem Restoration Communities network. It's a little bit of the twin to The Weather Makers work. This is working at very, very small grassroots scales, but then sparking out into a region, going up in scale. So it's all a fractal. The Weather Makers are taking a big region and trying to project-finance that at scale, you know, with hundreds of millions of dollars. The ecosystem restoration communities effort is starting with ten thousand acres of heavily strip-mined land in coal country next to lovely Kentucky and using that as a place to imagine a regenerative economy that will spring out to regenerate a million acres in Appalachia. And the incredible thing there is the very first Buckminster Fuller Challenge prize went to John Todd, a mentor of mine, and John Todd's proposal was to regenerate the Appalachian Mountains in a not dissimilar way to what Clifford Smith is now doing. So it's beautiful to see these cycles.
So we're working with the global network. There's a beautiful project in Somalia, efforts to do earthquake zone recovery in Turkey. John wanted this network to support work in some of the most complex places in the world, war-torn places recovering from civil conflict, places that have become heavily desertified that are going to take enormous effort to bring back, working with people that have been marginalized for all kinds of reasons, and giving a chance at hope and potential by restoring land, water, growing food, rebuilding culture, and sparking out to the broader region. This whole network is very fragile. We're helping them think about getting resource, like fundraising, helping them with governance, helping them with systems that will help each of these communities thrive within their separate networks.
And then, just quickly, so many more in the queue. We've reached capacity for the moment with eight projects. We would love to grow our staff, grow our team, and engage with more. But briefly, we are working closely with a project called Bioregional Digital Twin to create immersive visualizations, starting with the Gulf of Maine and in support of understanding, restoration of that region. So kind of a sister to the Gaia Consortium efforts and the Architecture for Planetary Regeneration: visualization, immersive visualization is really important. The strength of the Bioregional Digital Twin project is gamification. It's built on a game platform, literally. So people can really feel what it's like swimming around with seagrass and swim over to a patch that needs help, and then the next day they can go out in real life, literally, and say, Okay, I swam over there virtually, and, Okay, I'm going to get my boat. I'm going to dive down and do some planning the next day.
And then the last piece I'll mention is our work with what's called the Indigenous Knowledge Systems Lab. This is based in Australia. It was co-founded by five Australian Aboriginal custodians of land, who are very tied to their traditional life ways who are also bridge academics. So they all have advanced degrees from “Western” universities, and they are bridging between Indigenous and non-Indigenous ways of knowing, and they're offering their profound perspectives, not just on land management in Australia, of course, but their whole point, the whole point of that lab is an indigenous knowledge perspective allows you to think in a completely different way about ethics, and governance, and relationality, and connection. And we need this to figure out how we work with AI. We need this to know where and how to build and what our energy transition [might look like]. We need it for all of it. So we're in profound conversations with them about sparking many, many of these labs around the world and connecting design science—non-Indigenous ways of thinking about design planning, engineering, economics, finance—bridging that with Indigenous ways and finding a shared path forward. So I think this is very profound and will inform all of our work.
And then outside the Design Lab itself, we are setting up a new area of work that is design science consulting. So BFI itself, as a nonprofit, we can offer fee-for-service work, and so we're beginning to talk to potential clients around applying design science for things like a family investment office that wants to do something about climate, and they just get pitched all day, “There's going to be some magic solution.” The company thinks, “Okay, this will solve everything.” And we're talking about, “That's great. But we're talking about systemic solutions.” So we would offer design science approaches to a family office that wanted to invest systemically in a region or around a theme. And we'd like to offer this to other kinds of entities. Help insurance companies think about risk in different ways from a comprehensive anticipatory design science perspective—pension funds, other kinds of large institutional players. So that'll take some time to build credibility and stand up, but we're beginning those conversations and I think we have something really powerful to offer within the design science tradition of really working holistically, working with long timescales. And then the anticipatory piece is really important, too. How do we begin to understand possible negative side effects and design for that?
So I will leave you with a big set of opportunities. There's so many ways that I could really use your help with this work. You know, one is, you know, potential clients. If, as you go out into the world, you can think of a company that could benefit from an innovation lab that we could run for them or a family office that wants to think about investment in a different way—anything that might connect with everything I've been talking about with the Design Lab project, that could join the Design Lab. Is there something audacious that sounds like these things I've been talking about that would be a great next one, and I'll put it in the queue. It's hard to add right now, but we're already building the next 20 amazing potential projects that we’ll begin to work with over time. So I'm always open to potential nominations for extraordinary projects.
It would be great if you want to connect with any of the projects that I mentioned. Many of them have volunteer opportunities, all kinds of things they could use, from communications, marketing support, helping with fundraising, diving in and doing technical work together, setting up the tech stack to enable this amazing open design and knowledge creation that they're doing. So we'd love that and I can help connect you to those projects. If you're not a member of BFI, please consider joining and please consider upping your membership level. I'll just say this once. Love to have you and tell your friends to join. Tell people about BFI. Tell people we're doing extraordinary work. If you can think of someone who could make a meaningful donation, or you can think of a foundation. This is the number one thing that we could use right now. We're really trying to jump to a whole other level. This work is holistic. It's about resilience. It’s systemic. And we need we need support to do this effectively.
So any ideas that any of you have, please just reach out to me. I'll put my email in the chat right now. That's a great way to reach out. So it's just stuart@bfi.org. Who should I be talking to? What foundation actually would get this? What corporation would love to connect with this work? I would be eternally grateful. This is the moment that we really can have this huge inflection point in our work in the world. Get others to donate. Get others to join. Just let me know who might be interested in making a catalytic contribution to BFI.
And with that, I know that's just a lot. There's a lot has been happening all year. It's been. It's been a sprint from the moment I joined BFI. I've been all in on this, I've given everything that I have. I couldn't be more excited at the potential that we have in the world right now. People love to talk to BFI. People hear the name Buckminster Fuller—you'd be amazed. People all over the world, they just light up and they'll have their favorite quote, and more people than I could ever have imagined will tell me, “When I was in high school, Bucky gave this talk in this tiny town in Kansas.” He went everywhere. Year after year he would travel the world, especially to reach young people. And those young people ended up devoting their lives to this incredible systems changing work. And it's incredible to have that kind of identity in the world. To be the Buckminster Fuller Institute means virtually anybody would be excited to talk to us. And so it's opening doors and opening collaborations.
So with that, happy to take any questions. I know there been a lot in the chat. I'll try to catch up with some of that.
You know what I'd like to do is Yeah, see, whenever you run, oh, that stuff. Let's see if you can tag them. They're
five minutes.
And you know what, I don't know that many of us have really had a chance to meet you, Stuart. I'm just wondering if you can give us a quick look over your shoulder of the path that got you here.
Yeah, sure. Thanks, Mark. Sure.
Yeah, I kind of just like dove right in. There's so much to talk about. Yeah. Thank you.
I grew up in the coastal temperate rainforest on Vancouver Island. I was born in San Francisco, and I'm actually back in Berkeley. It's wonderful to be back in the Bay Area where the BFI is based. But my family moved when I was very young. So I grew up in an amazing, wild, rugged part of the world, literally, orca whales, humpback whales, out front. fjords, ancient forests, and fell in love with patterns, nature, complexity, had a gift for mathematics. So I did my doctorate in system science at UC Berkeley, with a lot of focus also on ecological economics, wrote a book called Ecological Design. And so my whole path has been around design thinking, whole systems design thinking and how that intersects with regeneration. And as I really dug into that I realized we had to transform economic models. For everything we tried to do would constantly be penciled out, as you know, not having enough enough return, right—not being viable. So I've also been really involved in thinking about regenerative economics and regenerative systems design. I spent three years recently at Capital Institute working with John Fullerton. They're a key partner of BFI. So John's doing really important work on regenerative economics. He's a huge Buckminster Fuller fan himself.
When I wrote my book, I had a long quote from Buckminster Fuller, I discovered Bucky by getting the Whole Earth Catalog. Somehow found a copy in Campbell River on Vancouver Island when I was a teenager and changed my life. Beginning to learn about Stuart Brand and Buckminster Fuller and just this whole amazing world of appropriate technology and systems thinking. So it's been a long sustained path of really applying always systems thinking—that very technical, scientific side—but also soft systems change, how we understand community transformation.
I worked at Eco Trust, an amazing bioregional organization working on restoring Cascadia, the Pacific Northwest. So I've always really loved efforts on the ground to help bioregions flourish and prosper, but always been a planetary thinker as well and just trying to connect all these efforts up and down scales across disciplines and couldn't be more delighted to have ended up at the Buckminster Fuller Institute.
We're glad that you're here. And you know, I'm sitting with many systems thinkers and artists and people that have been involved with Trimtab or in the Design Science Studio, and I just want to welcome everybody join us with Stuart here today in our monthly BFI community gathering.
Harlan, I see your hand up and you've got a question or anybody else would like to raise their hand?
Hi, Stuart. Oh my god I missed in the beginning but I got a good bid. And I'm so grateful and honored that you are now running the BFI. And the main point I want to make as you know, I've been part of the design science studio and I know a lot of the people that are in this meeting, but there's a show coming up at the Museum of Modern Art. I'm putting it in the chat. also put your book I gotta get your book ecological design in the chat, but I'm putting this link to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, a show opening in September, called Emerging ecologies that features the work of Buckminster Fuller among I think 40 different architects and designers. It's basically a survey from 1930 to 9090 of these emerging ecologies architectural mental architecture, and see if you have any connection or contact or know about this show of the be FBI, you know, I just wanted to throw that out there since it overlaps with BFR. Now, this is applicable in this show.
Incredible No, I was not aware of it at all moment did not reach out to us. This is This is incredible. Very inspired and what we might try to do, we'll reach out to MOMA and maybe try to do a side event or something.
Exactly. It only runs through January. So it's only a four month show. But yeah, figured Yeah, definitely want to know about and thank you, I'll be connected in some way or another to make the most of getting buches work in such a prestigious place right now, you know, to make the most of it and also to bring attention to BFI because I know you know a lot of people know about BFI, but I don't think enough people know, and I think it deserves the recognition and support of many more people, because it's especially now with you helping, you know, be directing it. So really excited about that for the future of BFI. And so thank you so much for being here today.
Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate it. Thank you. You know, part of the aspect of a community gathering is for you to get to know us as well. Stuart, right. Yeah. And so if I may, you know, I'm going to be so bold as to welcome for example, a few folks that I know that have come from the thread that you speak of with Bucky you know, and maybe Tara would like to share. Why should you feel what got her here? What's her thread that woven and brought her today? All right.
All right. Hello, everyone. It's very much enjoying listening and learning and with Thank you, it's just incredible to hear about these advancements that feels so meaningful and relevant and nurturing. I was brought in, in 2020, to the design science studio through various connections through Manda, a lot of people who knew what we had members were doing between Montreal and Delhi, which is where I'm from, as one of the first experiential equation studios for sustainable development solutions since 2013. We were a bit of an oddball in the creative industries, after years of working with citizenry and wanted to bring all that knowledge to environmental restoration, water conservation and education through entertainment and being huge, not just fans of Buckminster Fuller but also deeply indebted in learning and inspiration for years. So I launched a project called recreate is which aims to create urban restoration and work with multi stakeholder partners including public and private spaces. Man, thank you so much for accelerating the show highlight on us. Thank you. Wonderful to be here and meet so many people. I've learned a lot from bunny through the design science, first cohort our project was more designed and artificial. But it was incredible to learn with people like her and as we continue with Karen Sanford and so many others, it's just it's a privilege to be here
are a wonderful thank you for sharing that and recalculated
soon Yes,
please. And Richard. Hi, Katrina.
Welcome. Hi. First time I really got a chance to be part of this session and glad to be hearing what Stuart has to say wow, it's pretty exciting One of the things I just offer as a potential area of exploration is that I've been around buches thinking and so forth since the 1970s, early 1980s. Working on the concept of a design science profession in social work, which is my discipline, but more personally, I've been connected to the experience that he went through around suicide in 1927. And I would like to see a little bit more kind of recognizing that type of regenerative if you want living that that he just played, and I've been interesting. I've been involved in a suicide intervention training company that started in 1983. So we are celebrating our 40th anniversary this year along with the 40th anniversary of BFI so just an idea in terms of something that's a little bit different than some of the other ecological kinds of approaches, but it's a human living, CEPR living approach, that I'd be glad to talk to anybody about that. Kind of idea. So again, thank you and exciting information today. Right.
Thank you, Richard. Great to meet you. I'd love to hear you know a bit more. Maybe you can email me with some of your ideas. This is stuart@bfi.org.
And I'm Mark Ross, welcome.
Hi, thank you. I'm Mark roost with sustainable energy Inc. and I took Bucky Fuller's course in comprehensive design science in the spring of 66, when he was this distinguished scholar in residence at San Jose State, and in 73, or 74. I did world game and on Market Street in the warehouse. Well, and that was where he somebody showed three slide projectors on one screen with the dumb axiom projection. Use that to show how you do cotton at scale thinking and that of course, I drank the Kool Aid. So a few years later, I had I read about GIS and and an expert systems and I'm five minutes into the second one and I have a download Oh, environmental, economic and land use planning knowledge base and it looks like this. And you can see it was like essentially like what is now Google Earth it used to be keyhole where you can zoom in where you live. Well, if you can also put load information into the knowledge base about where you live. Now, the communities of science and the communities on the ground can collaborate on their common interest in a given ecosystem. Problem. Okay, so we just handled granularity and the knowledge base would be built around the Eco regions which were mapped this level this is 100 and originally 123. And it turned into 167 acre regions. It was funded by World Wildlife Fund and National Geographic. There was some sort of conflict National Geographic dropped out. And it's now 167 instead of 129. But though that's an average of 10 million but of course, it's not averages. But that Peter, since that is the consistent pattern of ecosystems, that's when an acre region is in that mapping. It makes a whole lot of sense to use that as the scale for designing a sustainable economy and if you do that, and you set up trade to the closest so geographically closest source of what you need, let's say your that your food is short on copper, so you get something in a plant that hyper accumulates copper and include that new diet. So what this does is rad drastically reduces the commercialized, exploitive global trade. And so Tim for Xmin was told to find out about this thing called GIS when he graduated from in middle at military academy. So he became a pioneer in GIS and digital Earth imaging and ran that program in the world in the UN for 12 years or something. And he came up with the same idea I have so you know, I met him in his fifth International Symposium on digital Earth in 2007. So we decided we were friends and we collaborate. So I'm going to see him on the seventh or eighth of this month of September in DC and I want to fold that work into the the BFI work. And so I would like it occurred to me that we could do the knowledge base as one of those fiscal sponsored projects in collaboration with the existing project. Yeah, we can tie in with these other groups.
Right, exactly. It fits beautifully with the architecture for planetary regeneration workflow. Yeah. Yeah.
And so that a guy who's one of the architects of the Veterans Administration, hospital Information Management System, is an expert in mumps, which is APL for databases, and he would build he would help build the actual computing platform in mumps. So that which is a programming language that's really really powerful and easy to learn to use, and he also teaches how to use it. And there are 1000s of people in the VA are retired from the VA who are experts at that, as well as hundreds of 1000s of doctors who had been through schools where they learned mumps, you know, where they learned Vista in their intern, they're interning, so we want to bring that together with it. And I plan to fund all of this once we get the battery and solar thing into production. We'll be making enough profits to be able to fund this entire effort. Well, great, great right now we're two guys on Social Security. So right now we're looking for money.
Great. I know you reached out in the past mark, so feel free to email me again with any updates. Yeah.
Okay. I see a preamble moment for David. Is there something that you want to share with us? Yes. Thanks
very much. Amazing to hear the stories online. I met Stafford beer in in the 70s. And Stafford found in his work that the biggest problem in all organizations he consulted with was making a choice between the present and the future. And he was trying to come up with a process that would equal that conversation. And he got a note from Bucky saying, Stafford, all systems are polyhedra. So ciphered chose the icosahedron to create a two or three desert person self organizing system and the first person first time we published Bill perk from Carbondale who became the professor in the department Bucky was in after Bucky traveled onwards, and Don Moore and other Bucky fan or associate joined our process and I had the good fortune of medium and the last person I want to mention is Gary Davis, an American who is involved with the Declaration of Human Rights which gave him the permission to choose the government he wanted the chose World Government and gave up his American citizenship. And Stafford and Gary collaborated to make the team's integrity process available for world citizens. I happen to be the coordinator of that the moment and I'm working with a group of people to not go after the huge cost the hedron two or three days process but a short online tetrahedron which we call trim table. Oh, I'll be glad to talk to anyone about that and I'll put my email in the box so I'll be I'll be windy listen to this recording again. Storage so I'll be looking for yeah
yeah. How can I share the rigging mark? What's the best way to do that?
Oh, well, we'll talk afterwards and we'll figure out how to kind of get that out to the community. Yeah. Okay. That'd be great. Stuart. We've come up to the end of the hour and we're really appreciate you coming in and visiting with the community, taking your time to share the path thing. BFI is now aligned with and your objectives and you've got quite a trail ahead of you. And I'm sure a lot of us are here at your side, and we look forward to continuing the dialogue.
Great. Well, thanks, Mark. It's my Zoom call. I'll just continue on for a while if you've got time that before Yeah, absolutely know if anyone wants to continue chatting and David, thank you for sharing that. Stafford beers work is incredibly important and I think needs more attention. I think he's fallen a little bit off the map and it's still so vital and important, and I'm very familiar with the Casa Hydral process. You know, J Baldwin wrote a beautiful book called Bucky works that really highlighted that process, and I would love to dig deeper into it.
I think Bonnie DeMarco came on there. The early integration as well. Great.
Well, yeah, yeah. I just I'm not sure if there'll be entire coherent but Well, I mean, I just want to start I mean, first of all, like, I kind of feel like my, you know, my head is exploding. There's so many
that's the plan. Exactly. glad you're here.
That part's great. And, you know, and actually, I often feel that way after, you know, these kinds of sessions and but I you know, I think our trim chat reading group just just read, you know, utopia or Oblivion, again, I after reading it in high school, but, you know, and clearly we're still it's more relevant now than ever because the options are clearly, you know, we haven't fully established the idea that we're on, you know, one spaceship that we've got, you know, we've got to take care of everybody, we still have these huge conflicts. So I guess my my thinking is, I think, you know, the two really powerful things that Bucky came up with the dynamic Dymaxion map and the geo scope. And I'm just wondering if there's a way and you know, I mean, my thought is like, what, what would it take to have a Dymaxion map and every high school classroom so that people start, you know, thinking that way? Realizing understand, you know, having that actual understanding rather than its distortion. And there we go. Yeah. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks, Carl Harland. But, you know, and similarly with the GAO scope, what you know, what if, you know, what if when we turned on the nightly news, we saw the GAO scope, what does it take to create a larger embrace of of a world that doesn't have these kind of, you know, territorial ideas this us versus them? And anyway, I just wonder, specifically, I guess, you know, what, creating geo scope on the next level and the and the dynamics and map?
Yeah, yeah. Well, there are great efforts to create the geo scope on the next level. So there's a company called Planet live. And there's another one called glow baya out of New Zealand. Planet live is out of Austria. They're doing phenomenal lighted spheres that can show seamless, you know, overlays of different kinds of datasets. So it might be planet live and globe via I put them in the chat, and so they make spheres that are digital spheres. You know, tiny led pixels. And so you can then display incredible overlays, like what's the real time fire status, real time flooding, you know, you can just Yeah, display typography on the screen or in an actual sphere. So it's, it's a glowing, glowing led sphere up to six feet diameter. So it's essentially like a geo scope. And you know, you just have a laptop interface and you can make it light up with all kinds of dizzying arrays of information. Yeah, and so that that kind of visualization. It's, it's becoming effortless. And so at one extreme, you have a company like Nvidia, which is now a trillion dollar valued company because it makes chips useful for AI. In Vidya is trying to create a digital twin for planet Earth. So they're trying to create a geo scope, they'll probably invest 10s of millions of dollars in this. It's, it's the geo scope concept.
And there's some European initiative Milna about that. Oh, yeah. Yeah,
Milton. Yeah. Milton, Ben Fay, we're talking closely with she's doing amazing things. She went through the design science studio. She is developing what she's calling the whole
earth game. That's a light night it will be you know, some aspects of the world game, but also not into the whole earth catalog. And she's trying to create a virtual environment that will engage youth and help them do their own kind of scenario building for planetary thriving. And then those results from this youth summit will be conveyed to the UN's first ever really positive forward thinking Summit. It's called the summit for the future September 2024. And so your delegation, kind of through the scenario process will feed into that and many other efforts. I
mentioned Medora Gable is probably involved in Yes,
yes, hopefully. This summit was also partially inspired by Kim Stanley Robinson's amazing book ministry for the future. So it's recognizing that the UN needs a much deeper engagement with with which Baqi practically.
Okay, if I try and back in for a moment, please. So the reason why I know about this show at MoMA that I introduced you to is because I just finished writing a book it took me 10 years as part of the design science studio, so I'm gonna throw that most half Wow, you're already know about it. I already followed up with an email to you. So you'll get this in an email. And then I've also launched as part of the design science studio, my YouTube channel. And so that's all I just wanted to share, you know, my own horn a little bit because I am so aligned with Buckminster Fuller's vision. It's guided the course of my whole life. There's a chapter in the book on it. And I'm just grateful to be connected here today with this. I've also been hosted starting to hosted my own new Earth visioning zoom calls, which ironically chose the same day as today but an hour earlier. So I came in late because I was finishing that call. But that's all for the few people on this call that haven't seen my book or my YouTube channel, the links are in the chat. Stuart, you've got a an email already in your inbox to connect us in no rush. You know, I know you're busy with all kinds of things, but we'll just stay connected over time and maybe have you as a guest on my youtube channel at some point to talk about BFI and all that work, so wonderful to be here today with everyone Thanks Good to see Mark and occurred all the all these people I've been hanging out with the last few years. So thank you again. Okay.
Wonderful. Harland. Congratulations on your book. That's fabulous. Well, Gina and I have spent a lot of time together. I'm curious if you have any reflections Gina.
I'm really, really happy here. This state of the art of BFI and all your plans. They're just amazing. And also as part of the design science studio, coming in to look at how we can spread new water, rehydration of the earth and like even the cosmos and ourselves and all those amazing opportunities and and really go after funding. This is just a very important time and I know if I can reiterate how important it is that we find funds for BFI, so put on why thinking caps and let's just get out there to you know, the real estate groups and insurance companies I mean, that's really pursue that so thanks, the steward for your base teamwork. I found out things today I had no idea so it's exciting to hear
well, thanks Gina and let's get your work funded to your work on hydration is so important. Yeah, yeah.
Well, I can only angels like I'm like already already. It's already happened in another dimension. Let's get it in this. No, I spent a lot of time in like serious meditation and envisioning and it looks like I'm doing but i i hope it has
great Thanks, Tina. Well, good at Does anybody else want to chime in?
Actually, quick question. I remember reading about Bucky working with some young people Philadelphia a long time ago, and building with paper houses it could be domes it could be dropped to people who are suddenly trapped without homes. Is that project or that capability? available anywhere and how we did that and how we could put it back in action as Rumi so many migrations and losses and homes Yeah, you know,
I'm all I can think of is Bucky worked with an amazing group of activists in lower Manhattan. Is that could that be the group? It was called Kairos group or something? Does anyone recall
iros ke IRS? No.
No, there's a whole book about it. So if that's the group you're thinking about, they did a lot of interesting design work. But as far as I know, there's not a good prototype. Right now that can be deployed, but there is an incredible bio ceramic house that is become available. And, and that'll be manufactured at scale soon.
In terms of corrugated cardboard. I worked for a year and a half with a custom corrugated cardboard manufacturer and the tools you would use are die cutting and the the printing that they do, you would simply print it with a wax or something or you know some sort of coating that would waterproof it is the key issue because otherwise if the water gets to the corrugated, of course it turns to mush. But as long as it doesn't, and there's there's a there's Flexographic Printing, which is the cheap simple printing which is ample for coding something with waterproof coat and it's done in line so it comes off the die cut press and it goes into the flexo press and comes out as a finished piece with scoring lines and cut and cuts already in place.
Thank you
know I'd also like to talk about the that several of the things people have been talking about as independent projects are all they're related to the geo scope and all that all of this can be represented on a computer and it can be represented. So the way that Bill Joy, who I'm forgetting the company he was in, but he was talking he was evangelizing keyhole when I met him, and he was talking about like somebody in a village who would see started their place and then go up and see progressively more space around them would see how their community and its lands are related to their neighbors. And this becomes the glue. If that's done and this is something that is a gut level. As I said, we're heart as a neural hardwired kind of experience. And so as we do this, when we create the knowledge base, and we create the visual overlays and we create the ability to do it like so it can look exactly like global or like Google Earth. Okay or Google Maps. I have zoomed in multiple times on my apartment and the garden out and back. You know, I can see all the structures in Google Maps, just by zooming in. And when you combine that with this is the tool for you to understand, to understand that thing, record this stuff you know and understand the stuff you don't know about ecosystems and your place and about producing an economy off of the surplus of the ecosystems. All of these things we're talking about trying to gather and contain as layers within that. And that would aggregate from scale from the smallest scale all the way up to planetary but the way that happens is by using a coherent, congruent Archit systems architecture in the computing. And that's what Chris Richardson can help us construct where he can construct it for us.
And the guy consortium is also tackling that issue. Yeah,
and I wonder, Oh, you mentioned in Vidya during the digital twin that really talking about so it Do you have contact into Nvidia where I could talk with them with Chris and with Tim Forsman about how what we're doing and what they're doing could be merged.
You know, I'm trying to reach Nvidia. So I'll let you know thank you build some better connectivity. They're
wonderful.
Well, well, wonderful. I do need to wind down now. Any any closing comments and Mark, I'll try to join these frequently. And maybe I can start giving brief updates, you know, at the beginning of the sessions and we can use my exam for these as well. Going wonderful.
Yeah. Wonderful. It's great to have that opportunity to go forward. Thanks, everybody else for joining us, and we'll see you next month.