Comprehensive Anticipatory Design: 2010 Buckminster Fuller Challenge Announced

Last May I wrote about the winner of the 2009 Buckminster Fuller Challenge: the MIT Media Lab and their solution to urban personal mobility. The topic for the 2010 Challenge was just announced. The Buckminster Fuller Institute will award $100,000 to the 2010 winner, and is looking for entries that exhibit broad design solutions to “create an enduringly sustainable future for all”. Elizabeth Thompson, Executive Director of the Buckminster Fuller Institute, explains:

We’re looking for comprehensive anticipatory design solutions that address multiple problems without creating new ones down the road - integrated strategies dealing with key social, economic, environmental, policy and cultural issues. Our entry criteria is deeply inspired by what Fuller termed comprehensive anticipatory design science - a methodological approach to solving complex problems that we feel holds an important key to how innovators need to be thinking about the design of strategies if they are to have a transformative effect on the system as a whole.

This vision moves beyond traditional problem solving approaches. We need more than just a purely technical solution to energy problems, for example. We need better design of technical products and systems, but we also need to create the right policies, incentives, and other components of a holistic solution that creates “an enduringly sustainable future for all”. Engineering Systems is one field that seeks to link traditional engineering analysis and design with other disciplines to arrive at comprehensive solutions; you can read more about engineering systems in this earlier post.

I’m thrilled to see the BF Institute’s continued devotion of resources and support to innovative design solutions that address some of our most important problems, particularly now with the interdisciplinary emphasis. Looking outside our own discipline, whether it’s engineering, economics, health care, or something else, can be a real challenge. But it’s at the interfaces between disciplines, I believe, that the greatest opportunities lie. We’ve created nicely partitioned disciplinary silos to work within, and have developed tremendous depth of knowledge within these boundaries. We will open the door to greater progress if we start to look directly at the boundaries, and perhaps allow them some permeability and pliability.