Spaceship Earth

On the subject of design responsibility, I would like to note two important designers who dedicated their careers to social and environmental accountability inside the system we call planet Earth – Buckminster Fuller and Victor Papanek. Both men were pioneers in their worldviews and opinions on the need for a reevaluation of our ideology in the design world.

Buckminster Fuller’s holistic understanding of the world was apparent in his 1969 publication, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, in which he stressed the obviousness of our limited resources (particularly fossil fuels) and the nature of our planet as a system in which we are all passengers and our every action is of consequence to us. He patented the “geodesic dome,” a concept put into creation all over the world as a sort of model of Earth’s systemic nature. A famous example is the Montreal Biosphere, for which internal temperatures could originally be controlled. Fuller’s understanding of systemic thinking was revolutionary.

Victor Papanek stated in his 1971 book, Design for the Real World that “by creating whole species of permanent garbage to clutter up the landscape, and by choosing materials and processes that pollute the air we breath, designers have become a dangerous breed.” True indeed, Victor. His dissatisfaction with industrial design's priorities is a voice of reason in an otherwise unrealistic and unsustainable zeitgeist. He designed many useful objects easily affordable by the most impoverished people in the world, such as a radio made out of tin cans and a candle intended for production in the poorest nations on Earth.

If we take a page out of Fuller's or Papanek's manifestoes and apply it to our own future designs, the world will be a much more sustainable system in the future.

The Biosphere's home page: http://biosphere.ec.gc.ca/

Papanek quote from http://www.treehugger.com/files/2005/01/victor_papanek.php