Bucky Fuller

After having dinner, and on my way back to the garage of the Royal Sonesta Hotel in Cambridge, I stumbled upon a wonderful retrospective of Buckminster Fuller and his work. I've come across him before but this time it was as if I was seeing him for the first time.

What impresses me right now in the context of my own work are his philosophies about systems and especially his personal definitions.

Like ephemeralization, or the idea of doing more with less - using resources and waste material from cruder products and recycling them into more valuable products.

Or synergetics, as a metaphoric language for communicating experiences - referencing the empirical study of systems in transformation - with an emphasis on total system behavior unpredicted by the behavior of any isolated components.

Thinking of the whole as being so much more than the sum of its parts - the accretion of individual units to create a complex whole that grows organically from the foundation upward - with the final piece dependent on the participation of each unit in order to succeed in its expression.

These ideas just scratch the surface compared to the deep thoughts of Fuller, but provide me with an ideal launchpad for delving into more on the subject.