Box Vox

packaging as content

April 22, 2008

Earth Day

Buckminster Fuller’s dymaxion map was about creating a less distorted map of a flattened out earth. (Not about packaging) Fold it up and you get an icosahedron-shaped globe. (Not a package)

And as much as this map reminds me of a diecut, folding carton, I’ll focus instead on Fuller’s philosophy:

The grandson of a Unitarian minister… Buckminster Fuller was an early environmental activist. He was very aware of the finite resources the planet has to offer, and promoted a principle that he termed “ephemeralization”— which… Fuller coined to mean “doing more with less.” Resources and waste material from cruder products could be recycled into making higher value products, increasing the efficiency of the entire process.

…Fuller was concerned about sustainability and about human survival under the existing socio-economic system, yet optimistic about humanity’s future. Defining wealth in terms of knowledge, as the “technological ability to protect, nurture, support, and accommodate all growth needs of life”, his analysis of the condition of “Spaceship Earth” led him to conclude that at a certain time in the 1970s, humanity had crossed an unprecedented watershed. Fuller was convinced that the accumulation of relevant knowledge, combined with the quantities of key recyclable resources that had already been extracted from the earth, had reached a critical level, such that competition for necessities was no longer necessary. Cooperation had become the optimum survival strategy. “Selfishness”, he declared, “is unnecessary and…unrationalizable…War is obsolete…”

Wikipedia

Randy Ludacer
Beach Packaging Design

(Dyamxion earth map animation by Chris Rywalt) Dymaxion_2003_animation_small1

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