copyright R. Buckminster Fuller 1963
The Comprehensive Designer emerges as the answer to the greatest problem ever addressed by mankind: how to service and feed all of Mankind. The Politician can't help this quickly. Scientists do not function in the comprehensive capacity.
"There emerges the need for a new social initiative which is not another function or specialization but is an integral of the sum of the product of all specializations, that is, the Comprehensive Designer.
The Comprehensive Designer is preoccupied with anticipation of all men's needs by translation of the latest inventory of their potentials. Thus he may quickly effect the upping of the performance-per-pound of the world's industrial logistics in four-fold magnitude through the institution of comprehensive redesign, incorporating all of the present scientific potentials that would otherwise be tapped only for purposes of warfaring, defensively or offensively.
In view of our myriad of performance-per-pound advances of multifold degree ....typified by rubber tires....it is seen as a meager technical problem to consider advancing the over-all efficiency of worldwide industrial and service logistics fourfold (to serve one hundred percent of the population)."
"The specialist in comprehensive design is an emerging synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist and evolutionary strategist. He bears the same relationship to society in the new interactive continuities of world-wide industrialization that the architect bore to the respective remote independencies of feudal society. "
"The more people served by industrialization, the more efficient it becomes."
"In contrast to the many negative factors inherent in feudalism, ...industrialism trends to 'accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative,' first by measuring Nature and converting the principles discovered in the measurements to mastery and anticipation of the vagaries....Productive continuities may be maintained and forwardly scheduled. There are three fundamental constituents of industry; all are positive."
POSITIVE CONSTITUENTS OF INDUSTRY
The all-positive principle of industry paradoxically is being assimilated by man only through emergent expedients, and only in emergency because of his preponderant fixation in the direction of tradition (emergence through emergency). Backing up into the future, man romantically appraises the emergent dorsal sensations in the negatively parroted terms of his ancestors' misadventures.
The essence of the principle of industry is the principle of Synergy. This principle is manifested both in the inorganic and organic. The alloying of chrome and nickel and steel provides greater tensile strength than its elements singly or in proportional addition. Three or more persons by specialized teamwork can do work far in excess of that of three independent people. The industrial chain's strength is stronger than its weakest links.
Man is doing more with less (Ephemeralization which is a corollary of the principle of Synergy) and is also demonstrating certain other visible trends of an epochal nature: an increase in literacy; more advanced study by more people; as he becomes master of the machine he graduates from labourer to research and development technicians, or production-inaugurated engineering, or education and recreation extension.
While man trends to increasing specialized function in anticipatory and positive occupations of production, he also trends to comprehensive function as consumer. Because the principle of industry improves as the number of people it serves is increased, it also improves in terms of the increase of the number of functions of the individual to which it is applied. It also improves in terms of its accelerated use.
Throughout the history of industrialization, the specialist has been encouraged, and the inherently comprehensive-thinking artist has been alienated economically. The exploiters, successfully successful, have tried in vain to freeze the dynamic expansion at the particular phase of wealth generation they monopolize. Every industrial success of man has been built on a foundation of vindictive denouncement of the founders.
Thus the comprehending artist has learned to restrain his heretical forward-thinking. How great and exultant their secret conceptioning must have been !
THE TIME HAS COME for the artist to come out from behind his protective colouring of adopted abstractions and indirections, World society, frustrated in its reliance upon the leaders of might, is ready to be about-faced to step wide-eyed into the obvious advantaging of its trending. We will soon see the emergence of comprehensive training for specialists in the husbandry of specialists and the harvesting of the infinite commonwealth.
The Comprehensive Designer will be accepted by the industrial authority because it has recently shifted from major preoccupation of exploiting original resource to preoccupation with keeping the "wheels," which they manage, turning. Severe acceleration in the trend of performance per pound of invested material now characterizes all world-industry.
World-industrial management will be progressively dependent upon the Comprehensive Designer to accelerate the turning of his wheels by design acceleration.
The designer will be accepted by Political leadership because they intend to up the standard of living of all world peoples by "converting the high technical potential to account through design." Only the designer can accomplish this objective.
As first of first things, the designer must provide new and advanced standards of living for all peoples of the world. Housing must be developed to provide for man's increasing transience, interconnecting every center of the world and penetrating even the remotest of geography. Implicit is man's emancipation from indebtedness to all else but intellect.