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As a young college graduate in New York City, I was fascinated when I first saw the seemingly weightless, multi-storey tensegrity structures, discovered by sculptor Kenneth Snelson when he studied with Buckminster Fuller. Their shiny, silvery aluminum rods and steel cable geometries were silhouetted against the blue sky. No rod touched any other; cables at each rod’s endpoints held the rods, seemingly suspended in midair, a perfect balance of opposed forces. What intrigued me, beyond the beauty of these structures and the geometries required to achieve their perfect balance, was their subtle behaviors. Tensegrity structures seemed to be a metaphor for the constant, subtle adjustment of nature’s collaborative ecosystems. Soon after, I attended Harvard’s Graduate School of Design and became one of the early members of the Philomorphs, founded, among others, by Stephen Jay Gould and Arthur Loeb (physical chemist who wrote the foreword to Buckminster Fuller’s book Synergetics and started a Design Science program at Harvard). Together they assured that “design science” would intersect evolution. Several years later I went myself to work for Buckminster Fuller to study tensegrity structures. Fuller’s concepts of synergy (the whole greater than the sum of its parts), synergetics (the dynamics through which synergy is achieved), and design science (the integration of two modes of thinking, synthesis and analysis), led me to explore the role of design in science, and a collaborative, synergetic model for the origin of life and its evolution. On a DAAD research fellowship I worked at the Institute for Lightweight Structures, University of Stuttgart, Germany where I developed formats to promote cross-disciplinary innovation, inspired by Fuller’s principles of “anticipatory design science.” I applied this method in my entry to the international competition for Kawasaki: Information City of the 21st Century sponsored by the Japan Association for Planning Administration and Mainichi Newspapers, with cooperation of ten ministries and three agencies of the Japanese government. This competition sought new methods to drive urban innovation as a complex adaptive system, bottom up. My entry, which tied with Matsushita Corp. for first place and won the Award of the Mayor of Kawasaki, developed a framework to promote urban innovation comprised of diverse interlinked components. Soon after, the Japanese government proposed to the Australian government to build a “city of the future” in Australia. I moved to Australia to work on this project. Top-down Design (with a capital D) and government bureaucracy failed to drive innovation in Australia bottom up, harnessing principles of self-organizing complex adaptive systems. I thought that more could be achieved by pilot testing this method on a smaller scale at NASA (U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration), so I moved back to the US to pursue this vision. When NASA designs missions into space, scientists and engineers must work together on some of the most complex, cross-disciplinary design challenges in the world. I envisaged that NASA would need a vehicle to drive bottom-up innovation and that addressing this need would put my method through its paces. The think tank/ collaboratory that I entrepreneured in several forms at NASA was a neutral concept were it not for NASA’s mission to explore space, today’s politics, and the state of our world. Although I developed the program plan for a Bio-IT Think tank BEACON and later for NASA University, during the Bush administration, again top down Design prevailed.
So I focused on completing writing I had begun before working at NASA, which evolved into two complementary books: If Microbes begat Mind and What Daedalus told Darwin _________________________________ |
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right: Kenneth Snelson tensegrity tower |
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© Zann Gill 2008 – 2012
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