Although it’s hard to find info on, Buckmeister Fuller spent some of his best years working out of The Science Center, an incubator system/building/thing near the University of Pennsylvania. Around the time he died, the Buckminster Fuller Institute was founded, to do great projects, and in general make the world more, uhh, Fulleriene. Somewhere along the way, it moved to Stanford, and then to NYC, but something about it’s “We have to do it ourselves, no one else is going to” attitude still says it has some Philly spirit at heart.
The Buckminster Fuller Challenge (BFC) is a competition that the institute runs for “Catalyzing the vanguard of a design science revolution” or in English “Make great things, because we’re screwed if we don’t.” BFC is awarding $100,000 to support the development and implementation of a strategy that try to solve and invent our way out of humanity’s most pressing problems.
If you want to try for it the deadline is October 30th, 2009. For more information about the Challenge, visit challenge.bfi.org, or at the very least watch the cool little Bucky Movie. They also archive past entries, which is an amazing resource of ideas just crazy enough that they might work, like SubwayEx.
As they say on the site, Bucky had it right. “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
(note: cross-posted at FarMcKon.net).