3.2.1 John McHale, a Scottish born artist, could easily qualify by Fuller's standards to be named an "Anticipatory Design Scientist." He was a blend of an artist, sociologist, scientist, ecologist, and designer whose writing reveals an intense concern with the aesthetics of the future. In the 1950's he was instrumental in founding a group called The Independents, along with artists Lawrence Alloway, Reyner Banham, and most significantly, Richard Hamilton. Early on the group discussed the ideas of Norbert Weiner, Claude Shannon, von Neumann, and van Vogt. John McHale was responsible for introducing Buckminster Fuller to England by inviting him to talk at one of their events at the ICA after encountering him during his visit to the United States. Richard Hamilton, in turn, introduced Fuller to his students, among whom was Roy Ascott, who soon after developed experimental projects in telematics and was the first to write on cybernetics and art.

3.2.2 Fuller and McHale co-author a series of six documents for the World Resources Inventory between 1963 and 1966. An altogether idealistic image of the computer network is presented with the ability to gather and coordinate vast amounts of information, enabling artist to design holistically. Fuller, outlining the project's agenda in the "Design Initiative" of 1964, calls for a general extension of a dynamic network operating principles into formerly static areas of environmental control both "internal and external." A year later, undoubtedly under the influence of Fuller and McLuhan, McHale elaborated in the "Ten Year Program" on the prosthetic extension of the body and the mind with latest technologies. This organic extension is exemplified by communication electronics and the computer. Their exponential miniaturisation "towards invisibility" and increase in power approach the "dimensional complexity and performance per unit of nature itself." (McHale, Fuller. 1964. pg. 73)

3.2.3 Fuller uses the third document in the series "Comprehensive Thinking" to advise the "design science artist" that the technological extension of the human body into the farthest reaches of the electromagnetic spectrum will lead to a historical era of "invisible architecture" that is only detectable by an aesthetic instinct located somewhere between the unconscious and the conscious. (Wigley, 1997, pg.17.19) In 1969 John McHale publishes Future of the Future, in which he takes a critical look at technology, drawing heavily on cybernetics with a keen interest in sociological and environmental issues. Later he co-founds and directs the Centre for Integrative Studies at the State University of New York at Binghamton.

3.2.4 To Fuller and McHale, the computer is the basis of a new and attractive architecture. Fuller and McHale adopt a cybernetic account of the production of knowledge, insisting in a 1966 article on the possibility of a global university orchestrated by communication satellites, transistor radios, telephones, and television sets‹that computers will facilitate the emergence of "world men" who are not confused by the explosion of information about the earth and its peoples but are able to conceptualise this whole as easily as one previously conceptualised one¹s hometown, neighbours, and surrounding country. This scientific project is an aesthetic project. McHale describes in the fourth document the arrival of the ³instant city phase," inaugurated by electronics, in which a "centre can be anywhere‹even in orbit around the earth." (McHale, 1964, pg. 90) Building must be as mobile and ephemeral as the nomadic clusters of information that endlessly circulate. Indeed, they are constructed out of information. At the end of his life, Fuller reasserts this idea: "The new human networks' emergence represents the natural evolutionary expansion into the just completed, thirty-years-in-its- building, world-embracing, psychical communication network." (Fuller, 1983, pg. 32) [top]