Spatial Thinking

Bucky time seems to have arrived (no doubt he predicted about how long it would take for his ideas to reach their moment - he always appeared aware of how long it would take for new ideas to become obvious, depending on the field of study).

He seems to have used visualisation as a way to approach the world, and whether you think it stimulates holistic thinking (whole-istic?), or the right brain (or the cerebellum as Stan Gooch controversially suspected) these meditational devices may feel to you as inspirational or soothing, fascinating or simply beautiful.

This one appears on Grunch.net here


By Chardhawk (or can we assume that means by Richard Hawkins & Kirby Urner?)

Anyway, Synergetics on the Web (definitely attributed to Kirby Urner) might intrigue you for a while...

"The brilliant manner in which Fuller fused the development of a revolutionary structural system, the geodesic dome, out of a combination of many hundreds of paper and cardboard geometrical models that were ostensibly intended to be analogical aids for a system of thought, deserves careful consideration. Perhaps the best explanation of it is offered by his 1989 biographer Lloyd Steven Sieden.

'Thinking is sorting experiences’, writes Sieden at the beginning of his exposition of Fuller’s approach, ‘Separating the huge set of experiences that are irrelevant from the very small set of experiences that are relevant’. But irrelevant material itself falls into two categories, and Fuller believed that imagining thought as a transparent sphere helped him to see a way of distinguishing between them. He visualized a situation in which all irrelevant experiences that were too small and too frequently occurring were inside the imaginary sphere, and all those that were too large and too infrequently occurring could be regarded as outside it.

The way Fuller imaged the thinking process, the surface of the imaginary sphere itself would then only consist of relevant experiences, or thoughts. He then wondered how many relevant experiences it would take to establish the ‘insideness’ and ‘outsideness’ necessary to create a sphere of thoughts. His answer was that while any two experiences could be joined by a line, it too three to fix their relationship – a concept perhaps not dissimilar to the journalistic principle that it takes three events to make a trend. This point Fuller diagramatized by drawing a triangle. But to establish a sphere containing ‘insideness’ and outsideness’ something robust enough to be called a thought, was impossible using flat triangles on paper, because the triangle had no integral space-enclosing depth. Three-dimensional structure, in thought as in geometry, could only be achieved by plotting in a fourth experience. The resulting three-dimensional model, a three-sided pyramid, or tetrahedron, Fuller came to believe, was the true geometrical model of a thought. It consisted of four points, or experiences, which in turn generated six sides, or relationships."

from p122 of Martin Pawley’s little book on Bucky

Hey, feeling child-like? Try this Bucky4kids site - why not?

you'll find all sorts of fans out there...this website hasn't updated since 2006, but might prove worth a visit...

"The whole world has to be turned into music or into a Fuller university." John Cage