What is Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science and why is it relevant and critical in the today's world? Some 30 years ago, Buckminster Fuller came up with a plan to plug all the world's continents into the same electrical grid. The idea was to let power flow between, say, Siberia and the northwestern US, or Norway and Laos. Energy companies dismissed the notion as pie in the sky - and then proceeded to build such a grid. To get the most use of their generation capacity and to maintain an emergency reserve, power companies found it efficient to connect their grids to their neighbor's, who then connected to their neighbor's. From a global perspective, we are faced with daunting challenges as documented by World Resources, 1996-97: the accelerating confluence of population expansion, increased demand for energy, food, clean drinking water, adequate housing, the destructive environmental effects of pollution from fossil fuels and nuclear waste, plus the growing divergence between the haves and have-nots and the potential for ensuing conflicts. Only recently have national elected officials realized what global corporations already know: the issues of today and the future transcend political boundaries and nationalistic thinking and are globally interrelated, affecting each other in multiple ways. When viewed as a whole, solutions arise that address multiple, interrelated issues in ways that otherwise would not be apparent if addressing each issue in isolation. Some strategies must be global, and any investigation into global solutions must, therefore, be comprehensive. Population growth, energy demand and pollution are predictable as trends. Planning must anticipate these trends if we are to find solutions that can stay ahead of them. We then ask the engineers and architects to design systems that will enable us to provide a desired quality of life. http://www.google.com/url?sa=U&star....shtml&usg=AFQjCNFiHI2vS7S2tyX1X4Q3Hoo-d_YNHw more http://www.google.com/url?sa=U&star...d.html&usg=AFQjCNEaXtOuzkA7V2fDg2Z4jA990cquEw
