Buckminster Fuller made the point that all systems may be understood as polyhedra. A line is thus common to two contiguous areas, whereas a point is usually common to a minimum of three areas. Fluidity of the language One purpose of the language is to channel, and give rigour to, the fuzziness of normal policy debate. Often the point structure of a document is a major guideline. This tends to be absent in verbal debate.
Items can be expandedout of points and contracted back into points.
There would be considerable advantage in being able to provide a visual display of an evolving debate in such terms. Under the best circumstances participants will in effect be endeavouring to construct a coherent and integrated form so that feedback on its intricacies would prove of value. The fluidity noted above is basic to the potential for representing developmental and transformational pathways without loss of continuity. Growth and extension can be tracked by allowing a full range of geometric extensions of a structure. This may be understood as flattening the vertex or edge to obtain a new faces, vertices or edges.