“If you are in a shipwreck and all the boats are gone, a piano top . . . that comes along makes a fortuitous life preserver,” Fuller once wrote. “But this is not to say that the best way to design a life preserver is in the form of a piano top. I think that we are clinging to a great many piano tops in accepting yesterday’s fortuitous contrivings.”

The New Yorker has an excellent piece on Buckminister Fuller, the inventor of the geodesic dome displayed in a grand fashion for the U.S. Pavilion for the 1967 World’s Fair in Montreal.

The geodesic dome as you know encloses more space with less material than any other structure and can withstand tremendous pressure (a staple for most sci-fi futuristic movies). But yet they are considered a “massive total failure.” Anyone care to guess why? Anyway, Fuller’s mission was not aimed at selling the Dome but hammering away at people’s stagnant capacity for change.

Presenting five designs for sustainable and urban farm towers that might revolutionize agriculture.

Now if I had one of these, I would grow roots in this thing. Really innovative [via Boing Boing].

“The majority of the world’s designers focus all their efforts on developing products and services exclusively for the richest 10% of the world’s customers. Nothing less than a revolution in design is needed to reach the other 90%.”

—Dr. Paul Polak, International Development Enterprises

Looking beyond our usual perspectives can not only be enlightening but also mighty useful for sections of populations that have escaped our attention thus far. The National Design Museum in New York is hosting a Design for the other 90% exhibit. Another set of designers called themselves Designers without Borders. Interesting stuff [via].

WIRED and LivingHomes—a pioneer in green, prefabricated development— will open the doors to the first ever WIRED Home, a showcase of the best in sustainability, technology and design.