---
id: people/buckminster-fuller
about:
  label: Buckminster Fuller
  depiction: people/buckminster-fuller.jpg
  depiction_credit: 'Dan Lindsay, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0.'
  description: >-
    American architect, designer and systems theorist (1895 to 1983) whose World
    Game had players use world data to plan how resources could serve all of
    humanity.
  tags:
    - World Game
    - systems
    - design science
    - Spaceship Earth
person:
  affiliation: Southern Illinois University Carbondale
  role: architect and systems theorist
  homepage: 'https://www.bfi.org/about-fuller/'
provenance:
  origin: agent
  sources:
    - title: Buckminster Fuller - Wikipedia
      url: 'https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckminster_Fuller'
    - title: About Fuller - Buckminster Fuller Institute
      url: 'https://www.bfi.org/about-fuller/'
    - title: World Game - Wikipedia
      url: 'https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Game'
  created: '2026-11-02'
  reviewed: '2026-11-02'
  reviewed_by: 'Claude, from the sources listed'
  status: draft
---
Richard Buckminster Fuller was born in Milton, Massachusetts, on 12 July 1895 and died on 1 July 1983.[^1,2] He styled himself R. Buckminster Fuller in his writings.[^1] He held 28 US patents, popularised the geodesic dome, and coined or popularised the terms "Spaceship Earth", "Dymaxion", "ephemeralization", "synergetics" and "tensegrity".[^1,2] He called his work "comprehensive anticipatory design science", aimed at problems of housing, transport, education, energy, ecological destruction and poverty.[^2,3]

The World Game was his educational simulation of the world's resources, played cooperatively on his Dymaxion map, with the aim to "make the world work for 100% of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous cooperation without ecological damage or disadvantage to anyone".[^3] He and the artist John McHale meant it to be the core curriculum at Southern Illinois University Carbondale in 1967, and founded the World Resources Inventory to do the research the game needed.[^3] He imagined a computerised network that would map and visualise environmental data, some of it from satellites.[^3] The first game ran over fifty hours in June and July 1969 in New York, with 27 graduate students working out how to end energy poverty, and in 1972 he and others founded the World Game Institute in Philadelphia.[^3]

The World Game is listed in the lineage of [civic models](/terms/civic-models-simulating-the-world-direction/).