From Living Tree Bridges to AI Systems: A Design Catalogue of Optimism and Resilience for a More Livable Future

“Design is the enzyme that helps people face and metabolize change.”

In the summer of 1948, Black Mountain College informed a class of students that the star architect whose class they had signed up to take had cancelled; he was to be replaced by a Harvard dropout who had never taught before.

What neither the students nor the college knew is that Buckminster Fuller was lucky to be alive at all. A quarter century earlier, when his business went into bankruptcy and his four-year-old daughter die...