A Homage to Livingry

Buckminster Fuller's Design Science for All Life

"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete."
— Buckminster Fuller

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Anticipatory Design Science
Designing Livingry in the Age of Grassroots Coordination

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This piece is a small homage to Buckminster Fuller, and also a living set of notes and reflections after visiting George Orbelian from Buckminster Fuller Institute. George did well to reminded me of Fuller’s blueprint for systems-level transformation - grounded in nature, ethics, geometry, and design. What follows is a brief narrative meditation on key aspects of his life’s work—and how we are now beginning to see its realization through emergent technologies and re-emergence of ancient coordination protocols.

Let us begin at the heart of Fuller’s vision:

Designing for Life, Not Death

One of Fuller’s most striking conceptual contributions was his term "livingry." In contrast to weaponry, which dominates and destroys, livingry is the application of design to enhance the well-being of all life. He believed that humanity was at a crossroads: we could either continue producing tools that escalated conflict and scarcity, or shift toward a paradigm that prioritized cooperation, regeneration, and abundance.

Livingry was not sentimentalism; it was systems thinking applied to survival and thriving. Fuller believed that design could be the highest form of human intelligence, especially when applied to the collective good.

Livingry

An Homage to Buckminster Fuller’s Call for Tools that Serve, Not Conquer

We, passengers aboard Spaceship Earth, step forward into the age of Livingry.

This is not an ideology.
It is a practice. A promise. A pattern.
It is what happens when we ask:
What can we design that makes war, poverty, and destruction not only unnecessary—but unthinkable?

Livingry is the design and deployment of tools, systems, and agreements that support the integrity of life—
not some life, not marketable life,
but all life, in all directions.

Buckminster Fuller warned us that weaponry was obsolete.
He showed us that cooperation is more efficient than competition.
That synergy is not idealism—it is physics.
That the planet has enough.
What it needs is better coordination.

Livingry is the answer to that need.

It is comprehensive—because life is not separate.
It is anticipatory—because crisis is inefficient.
It is design science—because art and engineering must serve together.

Wherever Livingry moves, we find:

• Tools that are regenerative, not extractive

• Economies that measure commitments, not just currencies

• Networks of trust replacing pyramids of control

• Systems that evolve through feedback, not fiat

• Communities that build capacity together—not in competition

Livingry doesn’t ask for permission.
It doesn’t negotiate with scarcity.
It builds models of sufficiency that render old systems irrelevant.

It moves like a fungal network.
It flows like sunlight through leaves.
It organizes like water, like roots, like a circle of people under a baobab tree.

In places like Sarafu.Network, in ancestral labor exchanges, in mutual care protocols,
Livingry is already alive.
It just needs more stewards.

Let us build not empires, but ecosystems.
Not algorithms of profit, but languages of reciprocity.
Not monuments to power, but infrastructures of belonging.

Let us design, not for dominion—but for dignity.

This is Livingry.

A science of survival.
A celebration of the possible.
A quiet revolution in how we care for each other and our Earth.

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This vision of Livingry compelled Fuller to develop what he called Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science. Fuller described this as a disciplined method for solving complex global problems. It is comprehensive because it accounts for the interrelatedness of all systems—social, ecological, technological, and economic. It is anticipatory because it aims to foresee and prevent breakdowns rather than react to crises. And it is design science because it approaches these challenges with the precision and iteration of engineering and ecology, rather than ideology.

Fuller believed that design was not just about aesthetics or convenience—it was about survival. His principle was that if we design systems with integrity, efficiency, and foresight, we could serve everyone on Earth without ecological degradation or war. "Ephemeralization" was one of his key ideas: doing more with less until we reach a point where resource use becomes elegantly minimal.

He spent much of his life proving this through prototyping. And that brings us to his most iconic project:

The Geodesic Dome and Synergetics

I got to know of Buckminster Fuller through the Bucky Ball - The geodesic dome wasn't just an architectural innovation - it was a proof-of-concept for how natural principles of structure and efficiency could be translated into human habitats. The dome's design allowed maximum strength with minimal materials. It was also a metaphor for synergy — Fuller’s term for the behavior of whole systems that cannot be predicted by analyzing their parts.

He later expanded this into a system he called Synergetics. Through geometry, math, and cosmology, he explored how the Universe organizes itself and how we might align human systems with those organizing principles. He was, in this sense, a cosmologist of care.

The World Game and the Geoscope

In the 1960s, Fuller proposed two massive, visionary tools:

• The World Game: A simulation and planning tool for solving global challenges collaboratively. Players would not compete, but work together to optimize energy use, food distribution, and equitable resource sharing. It was intended as a blueprint for peaceful coordination at planetary scale.

• The Geoscope: A 200-foot diameter spherical display, connected to real-time global data, that could visualize resource flows, ecological trends, and human impacts. It was an early conception of what we might now call a world computer or digital twin of the planet.

Both ideas anticipated not only the internet and environmental monitoring systems but also the spiritual need for feedback-rich, data-informed collective intelligence.

Yet even Fuller knew that such a vision needed something deeper than tools: it needed culture, commitment, and a protocol for how humans might agree to coordinate.

What Fuller Was Missing

Fuller didn’t have the decentralized technologies or the socially rooted protocols to truly realize his visions at scale. His era lacked digital ledgers, mobile infrastructure, and programmable agreements. Most importantly, it lacked frameworks for local-to-global cooperation without centralized control.

But the seeds were already there. What he called "livingry" can and is now be implemented through open networks. What he described as "anticipatory design" is now within reach through decentralized data systems and feedback protocols.

Enter the world of commitment pooling protocol and the Sarafu Network.

Livingry Today: Commitments as Coordination

Across the globe, communities are reclaiming the capacity to coordinate resources without dependence on centralized currency or coercive markets. Through basic coordination protocols, individuals, groups, and businesses log and exchange commitments for: labor, food, services, and materials.

These are not just transactions. They are records of mutual trust rooted in cultural traditions. In Kenya, systems like Mweria have long embodied these principles—rotating labor, shared harvest, and social reciprocity.

Now, with the help of mobile technology, data visualization, and open-source infrastructure like Sarafu.Network, these traditions become digital livingry: regenerative systems that map and respond to real community needs. Fuller spoke of natural systems’ elegance. These tools now reflect that in practice.

Anticipatory Design: Mapping What Matters

Digital Livingry infrastructure like Sarafu Network don’t just show who traded what. It visualizes flows of trust and stewardship across bioregions. When each dot is a family or group, and each line a fulfilled promise, we are watching not a financial market, but a living commons in motion.

As networks form utilizing common commitment pooling protocols, they begin to resemble a Buckyball, a geodesic structure made of hexagons and pentagons. Like in tensegrity structures, where rigid parts (like rods) are held in place by a web of continuous tension (like cables), these social networks stay strong and flexible by balancing many small commitments across a distributed web of trust.

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Real-time data from viz.sarafu.network - each dot is a family or business and each line is an exchange of committed resources (denoted by the colors)

Commitment pooling allows for future planning and resilience building. People can co-create credit for things like food sovereignty, water systems, or ecological regeneration—and exchange it meaningfully. This is anticipatory design made local and alive.

And unlike centralized models, these systems are governed by the participants themselves. They are non-extractive, polycentric, and rooted in ancestral wisdom. Fuller dreamt of a "world computer" not to control us, but to reflect our intelligence back to us. Now we are beginning to build it.

Toward a Fuller Future

To walk in Fuller’s footsteps today is to:

• Design or revive protocols that prioritize reciprocity over extraction

• Visualize coordination from the local to the planetary

• Use technology to amplify intelligence, not control it

His legacy of anticipatory design science is not a historical artifact. It is living today in every shared commitment, every distributed network, every common pool of care. It is not housed in towers or locked in patents—but carried forward in the memory of forests, in the math of domes, and in the calabash passed hand to hand.

This is the science of survival. This is the geometry of grace. This is Fuller’s call.

Let us answer it.

*Thank you George for the beautiful reminder and morning walk.