coming back to america trying to figure out what to do next and i was tired of working in the corporate world for you had you did a green business or something and i worked in the software business in the early mid eighty's right a company out of silicon valley opening an office soon peris so i got to work abroad and after working for a company for two or three years i realized that my psychological makeup was such that  working for a corporation was not how i would find the good life even though that was on the cutting edge of the digital new super model world is there some of the design possibilities and change possibilities within that world of computer graphics and so forth but sometimes there is but if you're working with our company that's trying to make a return on investment in a short period of time and i believe values of transformation and change get mixed with  of western civilization so the metaphor that we're using for this project and the endeavors are that we're supplying the educational technology thread that leads the individual through the labyrinth of life to the throne room of high design science intelligence never anticipatory design or design and we're into film projects we're into interactive video and we're into solar by inventing the future right and that has in a certain sense enough in a focus it has it's resurrecting in a certain sense sad to say in a certain sense but it does seem to me it is resurrecting to the proper place the central role in a very real sense of our buckminster fuller who was i will remember was the mind as it were of the of the sixty's and so forth synergetics and so on and he seems to have been in a sense eclipse really set up our search and go our journey that we took and then we did find by doing this process that a lot of people were very excited about bucky's work and one of the talk about it and and sixty s and early sixty's so it was marshall mcluhan in trying to understand comprehensively what it is that is going on and he had written these incredibly interesting books critical path and operating manual for spaceship earth and i thought the best that he ever did was intuition a long poem that came out of nine hundred and sixty nine and he was in a store brand would say was the mind or the inspiration on the whole earth catalog and i would to go into a bookstore the other day and i couldn't find it in the bookstore you know it's our friend the intuition in the books when i sit for him the young lady said who was i don't know but he's beginning to be resurrected  who was outside of academic departments and outside of the usual classifications that we try to pin on people is he a futurist is he a scientist is the an architect has an engineer is he a gotten enough attention in the academic world doesn't know how to deal with comprehensive type thinking or it's hard to find a place for it unfortunately more and or sense the world you know the world has become specializes we live in a time of information overload we come into an informational environment and as so much information it doubles every five years and everything has become so highly specialized that a place for a comprehensive this seems on the surface of it innocent unless you go to systems thinking these are the surface of an absurd because everybody's running so hard to try to keep up with all the dimensions of new developments within their field the amount of information doubles every five years or it comes exponential and out of hand but he was and always did preach a comprehensive systems understanding of what was going on you know why do we have specialist why does that continue well that's a good question to ask it's easier to control people if they know idea of an expert or someone who knows  what is it an expert ners less and less about what's really important or maybe more and more about less and more and more about less than let's say yeah right well it's easier that way that's that's that's how that tax system set up that's for television is part to blame of course this idea of prime time this idea of the time slot when certain things will be shown and so there's a lot of some people who are trying very hard to keep up as we said and yet like i i add don't want to get carried away with it we want to talk some about the same things you bring up some of the most and you know that particularly in terms of bit of an ecological  living machines and people who are in the sense of picking up some of the designs from nature and that we are in touch with nature and having a sense of ecological concern is one of the principal feelings and the thing the the  our technology whether to has been very primitive in terms of understanding nature as a model of technology or technology still uses or takes more than a canvas or technology of transportation for instance and all this talk about the multimedia revolution and how it's going to affect knowledge and and information exchange is important but i think the question is where is the energy coming from that supports these computers so obviously technology is not just it's not just to have an answer in one dimension we have to look at where our energies coming from and that gets back to what bucky talked about wealth has to do with the intelligent use of energy and that's where using less than one percent of our daily income or daily solar income or using less than one percent we're mostly using our bank account when we could be living off the u s is still there when any good banker will tell you it's not a most crucial generation in the history of man and in a sense because we really do in a very real sense see ecological trauma with the also on the pollution with the car with the greenhouse development and the decimation in the two hundred thousand year history of the evolution of our species and it's a very critical time a crucial time where we have to really find some way and it's hard to find inspiration from the  aeration certainly has the power to destroy more than ever before i think we need to learn to create at the same level we can destroy it's an issue  oh there's a sense in the human race is in a critical critical period i would agree with that yeah yeah yeah yeah i don't know if it isn't perhaps in some sort of a qualitative new way when you reach the point where where we literally can apparently michio kaku was on here a couple of weeks ago and i asked him he's a nuclear physicist yup develop these things he's he's ecologically concerned now he's can farm other people have been for that we do have for the st time the technological capability the extended i extended consciousness which technology is to make the world other than what was given couldn't do it in history to kill the tribe in the other valley but we do have a new promethea and capability to destroy the species we can't destroy the life of print we can destroy the species which is something and we've had probably been able to do that probably from around ninety five thousand four hundred and fifty five something like that in within our lifetime which puts a new kind of stamp urgency upon that and we seem to be moving in terms of the all paradigm in terms of the way spaceship earth has been operating in terms of the same moral principles of scarcity and so forth without there being any kind of visionary leadership from our political from our political leadership or from our business leadership or from the pilots and now  the space ship or don't seem to be having a sense of vision but it was made of historical mistake to think that politicians can solve problems that they can generate ideas and generate solutions to many historical mistake and of course the base of the mainstream media has bought into that they're just like a little locus going around looking for someone to speak about a topic or not really thinking it through politicians don't really solve problems in fact that may be the problem but here is a patrol story that if you take all the politicians on the planet and send them on a one way ticket around the sun ok the world would still get on in fact maybe even better after six months of realizing what that's like and we figure out new ways of trading we figure out new ways of doing things in the middle a whole new set of innovations but if you shut down the technology within six days we'd be on chaos with computers and television technology we can do away with a lot of the so called political process and have people directly vote direct to mock or see i think it's something we might see happen in the st cent ry certainly possible fear theoretically it's possible to sort of see a lot of the discontent that is it manifest in the society at large and one should feel a sense of that as you as you begin to look at the way things are going is  was talk of town meetings and people think disenfranchised and cynicism of all our leading institutions and so what is very very deep particularly among the young is a generational thing that starting to happen who feel that so there's been you know optimism by saying it is possible to to see an increase in terms of number of people who could be seen to be abs and i have not racial bias femoral ization or by good design of doing more with less that you can provide fact he no he thought that a political revolution was futile or in a sense i would agree with that so that is really in the sense of having a designer of this industry your film is largely your body and your project is largely a bobbit right as well we we trace the history of design can they getting of the century to our current time and then speculate on the st century and mostly looking at architecture and design but of course that spins off into many dimensions and it really gets down to the level of what the greeks called the kiss sticks which is the study of human settlements halley humans go about settling the landscape what is that process how can we trace it in order to understand it better and how can we intervene and try and be regenerative in our design so that our buildings give more than they take that  artifacts are making of things become more elegant and that we actually improve the condition on life and it gets into this question of what is the human function in the universe which brucie was very good at asking and a lot of people say well life is just theater and we're just players on the stage that's the general shakes nice general media and showbiz lucian to it we're just layers on the stage and design that we are in a sense counter forces to the nd law of thermodynamics that in the physical world everything is breaking down it's only in the medical physical world and things develop right ideas  knowledge or reason prove to you can learn less you always learn more that's right and then humans in a sense keep the world together we build bridges we build automobiles we build cities and that we do have a very important function  of keeping life regenerating and that our minds have a role to play and that if we don't get it right on this planet maybe mind will appear on other planets that this is an experiment initiative of the universe to see if mind can regenerate itself over night or over just pure dumb matter absolutely yeah and that might and is so precious when you think of it i mean we have a we have a of electromagnetic spectrum going out at the speed of light sixty light years out from the earth you know that contains all the television programs and we have no clear evidence probability theory tells us is unlikely it's likely that there is within the cosmos all systems tend to move toward chaos to the limits of the system and back he looked about and he said is there some purpose to biological evolution and it is to move across entropy parent we came to call it sin for people because they also brought into the common the process in which we are a far and if you have in a whole systems design the ability to see relationships between pattern recognizing capability to see relationships between parts or subsystems of when the overall system which is the time which we live we may be close to a time of coming into some new resonating reality to universe than that which we've been through out the human experience which might be the averse side of the destructive scenario we may be coming into some new relationship the universe now but you're right now we have will have to understand our function the universe and of course get beyond scarcity economics this idea of debt which is a political invention the universe does not operate according to that there's only harvesting and accessing the generalized principles of how universe works and then on using those principles to support life this idea of ted is totally understand and get into a cosmic level of understanding about what what sustains life what is it really and if it's if it wasn't for photosynthesis we wouldn't be here yeah ron and that the plants really are more in charge bankers are politicians who are so caught up in thinking they have solutions or ideas were were just in the wrong discourse so it's an essential to understand parallel universe and realize that a lot of what we're being told is true is just totally made up yet superstrings theory tells us that we probably live in a tent of measure the universe and that there are parallel universes through black holes and we're coming into new kinds of understanding and that we didn't have these understandings two hundred years ago physics we didn't have understanding of chance st of all you have we want to show you part of your film ok it is phil and again it's called ecological design and we're going to inventing the future invent some type of inventing the future comes from the understanding that if you want to know predict the designs of the industrialized world have developed beyond the limits of local ecosystems today are global technologies are depleting the earth's resources darkening the skies and world as with waste and endanger g much of life's diversity can we invent a more comprehensive way of designing which will integrate the built world with our larger ecosystem the biosphere can we find a way of life which will create a harmony between nature technology and humanity on an unimagined scale transform the landscape of the goods which poor from the production lines transformed our values the environmental consequences tree began with architects being inspired by an emerging age of industry and technology everybody wanted to believe to somehow function like a combustion engine and the monitors saw the building as an isolated object it was isolated from its environment and it was isolated from its urban context it was an object in space and independent of the street connections were severed so the gr recognize the earth i believe go back and look at it as a fresh source of the imagery through amongst designers today bring about the psychological revolution of design now or i have this is just going dead at something instead of having it says cycle all thoughts and ideas and potentially usages some through institution or other this is a person who is just figuring out what would be nifty to do next with what's available in the way of tools the responsibility of the designer is the of of the outlaw and the birth of the outlaw thinker is certainly to try to reach forward  restrictions of today beyond the stupidities of the current political situation whatever that may be the current way things are done and say god how should we really be doing this think of them as being completely in the world maybe right but we need them with rather than simply meant by going about our daily business in the same way we always have here was a man who had invented his own geometry and intellectual with the notion that we can design our world rather a film can and we would like to also let people know that the film as we get into it more goes into a very loud love and it goes into a car going to goes into katherine bates and and a great number of other of these people that are who could show it all we'd like to been able to show lot that stewart brand that he was an inspiration to that that he was inspiration to the whole earth catalog and i'd like to say he was also i think he was also the inspiration to the spirit what is now called the spirit of the sixty's the  and the and the urban development and the other kinds of problems but it might be worthwhile you mentioned before we went into the film for a lot he was a comprehensive philosopher and he was a philosopher he was hard to put a label on because he was a philosopher but i mean a comprehensive list but he did have this view of biological evolutionary purpose and universe he brought into the english language the word synergy which had hardly been used at all the synergy being the behavior systems unpredicted by the sum of its parts that there's a resonance that is more than the sum of the parts of a if you could say maximal engage system and if you draw from a  system where as within a system you may have information overload with all the information if you get draw away from it you could begin to see patterns in a comprehensive way and used to see the universe as opera or a mysterious sense he wrote it down and one of the most interesting things that he did if i could make is he said that mankind throughout all of human history and i've got a chart and maybe i can bring it up and explain it in a for a minute or two st but he said that throughout all of mankind's history that technology was an extension of consciousness and that through that the spear we gain power through the domestication of the horse would have one horse power but then with newt we began to get steam power and the technological development increasingly brought energy equivalencies and the ability the technologically augmented ability to provide for the world citizenry living room for the world two hundred thousand years and that we reached the industrial revolution and the curve began to go up this should be a parabolic exponential curve to really take it into account to try to show it here but you know the industrial revolution began a couple three hundred years ago and then the code began to go up and he was optimistic he said that the technology the technological capability with ephemeral ization of good design being able to do more with less that the percent to where there were forty three percent of the world population could see be seen to be haves in an abstract sense as opposed to the rest who were have nots of this is stor period he was writing in one thousand nine hundred and four we'd reached forty three percent and this is on a whole new world systems understanding it isn't any one town or one country and he said we had a twenty year period approximately variations on it be fifty percent of the world thirty three percent of the world had gotten to where in his world game thinking had could be seen to be haves and he said one night in about twenty years out from one thousand nine hundred and fifty four the year of the hydrogen bomb also finding d n a and so forth but that by don't it twenty years out there we would cross the fifty percent mark and in real terms there would be more haves than have nots in the world relative to  abstract technological capability of providing life support this is what i've seen met and i would submit this is what he wrote about intuition and this is what bobby dylan was singing about and was so widely felt into it could only be intuitively grasped it couldn't be seen in specific terms because we have these inherited sense with institutions that continue all of which were rooted in scarcity the iron clad assumption of scarcity but the spirit of woodstock the spirit of nine hundred and sixty nine the spirit that was being celebrated around the world being felt by so many of the artistic people was that in a cosmological sense we were transcending a situation where there were now more have been have nots on a world system the scale and that is the most important development that there has in the evolution of cosmic history and in terms of  ecological evolution the fact that there are more haves and have nots in an abstract technologically augmented sense is the most important development and i just wanted to put that down in this chart and refer to it because it was full of who did it and this is true if there are more haves and have nots this event or this fact is the most important factor and it should be subjected i would submit to something on the order of a manhattan project the best minds of the world should concentrate upon this altered and there's altered real situation that would actually transmitted scarcity and not ideals determines what we'd like to think but in realistic terms really who would be against having the world work for everybody one hundred percent of humanity had access to the idea and tools i don't know who would be against that other than those people that are benefiting from scarcity and i want to go into naming who they might be but of course that's where we're headed and that's worth working for and need to speak communicated more and if you get into writings about bucky fuller and technology innovation you see  that's where we're headed i think as the cold war is coming to an end and we're realizing that all this technology we invested in does not have a a trickle down effect you can't take a missile in and reuse it very well that this ship that we have to go from killing really to living really is a part of where we are right now in our evolution as a species and so we need to reimagine the world in a sense that you get new visions of desired futures about what it would be like if we had everything we needed that everything was a valid will i think a lot of that has to do with imagination and realizing that that can be done and getting images of desired futures because you can trace the rise and fall of a culture by the rise and fall of the image of the future right right so we really need to get up post modern image of what is desirable future and we're not getting it from our toxic media that's out there now so we need to get it through other places public access t v i think there's one place and independent filmmaking there's another place and i stress independent filmmaking that's where this film comes these revolutionary technologies like the personal computer like the video disk like cd rom like the camcorder and they could shoved down the existing paradigm yeah and a sense where you have paradigm paralysis as well as hardening of the categories and so we have to see these tools as tools of liberation and it does change the whole game and getting into an abundance state of mind is understanding that there is something called synchroni city that happens when we think about something and then the reality happens and that there are the universe does operate that well that way despite the human invention economy that we have yeah right so it's and how anticipatory design science and good science any federal ization will be able to find their way into the design by which we operate interrelated spaceship earth well you know the context within which will be able to do that is  is of that again back to your original premise and his and scott peck's is that we are here biological evolution our purpose is here to move across entropy and bring in priest patterns of conscious understanding to the process of which we are a part and we were part departure point in terms of that and there is a great danger of the concentration of the ownership of these turgid systems of production that have to come out of the historical and vicious and the institutions that have come out of the historical condition are having such absolute power to where they feel as though they can do without species they're allowing massive numbers of species to disappear but there are people who say there's all that to say fall or used if you fall are used to say that if we have a situation he was a soft foe he said that if one of us is hungry we are all on great and used to bother some radicals because he was not a socialist he was not one who wanted to do in any body you know he's innocent getting into it he said that if you're interested in presenting an alternative then it could be one that if you get to where you're transcended scarcity as a reality it would be possible to have by good design a system that could bring the have nots up with out bringing the halves down and it would be possible to include those who are  responsible for the historically inherited institutions in a pattern of understanding and those who want to change had the responsibility to present an alternative pattern of understanding to change with radical change to those who another assumption we make is that institutional think only individuals think only the individual mind can think and make decisions so institutions in a sense are our human creation and we know we assume there's intelligence initiative that individual ability of one person to make a difference i think that's part of what the design revolution is about is that each of us have a contribution to make and we've made a mistake by thinking we can count on the government to take care of things yeah exemplified in the government are part of it as well all except it's a little bit like a runaway cell with an a if you have an organism back and forth between all the cells within the body of one of the cells call a trilateral so whatever you want to do is one small groups do very very well is what we call camps or for the overall system has to be operating well and as we're doing as we said no they are if they do not have visionary we do not have visionary leadership that ecologically relates us in particular us to the other biological systems that the times do call for don't you think we need leadership or might do well to go in the visionary understanding it might do well to go back to buckminster fuller's and many of the good people who followed in his way in order to to recapture some of that which seems young people have not picked number of those people up but still even it doesn't seem to be in a in a sense that there are many more and the book that you have goes into many more of those who are there who are trying to talk to you to work with is within this acolytes and the ecological movement in a sense of ecological and city planning and the need to begin to come into city environments and to make changes at the city at all levels and the need for their view change is coming but there's a great deal of frustration against of the ten speed better than the st of the new nature makes many starts especially when she has something important to do so there's many experiments and there's many energy events happening right now in terms of moving us towards a sustainable regenerative a condom me that hasn't reached a critical mass yet we're still importing fifty percent of our oil and we still have an infrastructure that's based on petroleum products we have a consciousness now that we have to get beyond that and we have the terms of information to start networking around that so there's reasons to be optimistic that that's where we're moving towards and as i said before we need images that are desired future in order to continue as a culture and i think if people really get into the subject of ecological design running rejoinder to thinking that that's one of the point is the same should all be included for a new turn off turn off your mainstream networks because they're all based on the reactor for sponsors approach to going towards the future rather than the visionary approach they're more interested in spotting a problem and then giving all kinds of symptoms of that problem yet they stay in this recursive cycle of problems and don't break out into the the loop provide tears and visions you know that's not something that's encouraged  for whatever reason i don't want to get negative right now we don't want to get negative we can help and you won't believe in opening to work this idea i think fuller would want it to be one where it is able to be inclusive of people it's a matter of consciousness raising and understanding and anticipatory design application is what is called for more than some sort of confrontation and perhaps be able to see it rather than enemies it's like we're all in this boat together in a very real sense and we're a crucial time where we're heading for the preppers precipice and we really need some sort of a qualitative transformation to understand new realities and your film ecological design brings up a lot of these things and and i believe that making you something that everyone man and women human beings could think of doing on this planet making necessary and increasingly our home