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Dymaxion Map

UNPLUGGED: Buckminster Fuller: Re-Mapping Our Mental Model of the World

Richard Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Map helps replacing our 16th century mental model of the world with views on the 'spaceship earth' ready for the 21st century and the discussion of the different aspects of being UNPLUGGED.

An update by Andreas Hirsch

Even if one has never heard of the Dymaxion Map, a glance at the visual for the topic of Ars Electronica 2002 – UNPLUGGED - brings one in direct contact with the effects of that revolutionary concept. What at first might seem merely a solution for the deficits of the classical projection of the globe on a two dimensional map, is in fact the introduction of a radically new view on the earth as we know it. The practical philosopher Richard Buckminster Fuller invented the so-called Dymaxion Map (standing for: Dynamic + maximum + tension) to replace the Mercator-Projection, that was used over centuries and still lingers as the dominating model for viewing and describing the world. As early as the thirties of the last century, Fuller saw – when analyzing the distribution of resources on earth – the need to replace the world view of the 16th century with one for the 20th century. World War II, air travel and the understanding of living on 'spaceship earth' – the term he coined and is probably most famous for – led to the full development of the Dymaxion Map, that by recombining its 14 segments allows us to describe the world from different viewpoints: be it the world views of US-imperialism, Hitler’s Third Reich or Japans Visions of an Empire as Fuller has analyzed them.

In the current times of globalisation and a world where the concept of distance has become more relative than ever this model gains new and enhanced importance. The discussion about globalisation and its criticism demand a method to remap our mental model of the world, which still goes back to the days of the Conquistadores and indeed should be one belonging to the 21st century. The experience of personally experimenting with with the Dymaxion Map can hardly be replaced by merely reading about it. Richard Buckminster Fuller was an inventor, architect, engineer, mathematician, poet and cosmologist, but foremost he saw himself as a 'practical philosopher' who demonstrated his ideas as inventions he called 'artefacts.' It was his declared intention to enable all 'of humanity to see total Earth, [because] nothing could be more prominent in all the trending of all humanity today than the fact that we are soon to become world humans'. This and his other ideas make him one of the 'patron saints' of Ars Electronica 2002 – UNPLUGGED.





1 comment(s)
Re: UNPLUGGED: Buckminster Fuller: Re-Mapping Our Mental Model of the World (sheldon / 2002/5/3 7:12:06 PM)