7.5.1 Seeing our planet as a whole for the first time, when NASA started sending images back from it's space explorations did exactly that. The moment we zoomed out and saw the planet earth from an entirely different perspective had a profound effect on researchers from all disciplines. Almost immediately, theories of the Earth being a living self-organising system began to emerge. One of the most important proponents of this idea came, not surprisingly, from the NASA space program. James Lovelock, a British inventor, philosopher, and independent researcher, was one of a team of researchers invited to NASA in the early 1960's to devise tests for life on Mars. He came to a brilliant conclusion that life on earth not only made the atmosphere, but also regulated it‹keeping the earth at a constant composition, at a level favourable to organisms. (Lovelock, 1991, pg. 22) Thus the Gaia hypothesis was born:

7.5.2 Consider Gaia theory as an alternative to the conventional wisdom that sees the Earth as a dead planet made of inanimate rocks, ocean, and atmosphere, and merely inhabited by life. Consider it as a real system, comprising all of life and all of its environment tightly coupled so as to form a self-regulating entity. (Lovelock, 1991, pg. 12)

7.5.3 Lovelock was soon joined by biologist Lynn Margulis, and their fruitful collaboration resulted in a theory of complex networks of feedback loops that bring about self-regulation. Significantly, Gaia theory shows that there is a tight interlocking between the planet's living and non-living parts. But even more significant for this thesis is the fact that Lovelock and Margulis also challenged the idea of separate disciplines. Their research brought together practitioners from disciplines that never spoke to each other: geology, microbiology, atmospheric chemistry, biology, cybernetics, and so on. Their theory was met with strong resistance from the scientific community, refusing to publish their findings in established academic journals. Scientists claimed that the theory was unscientific because it was theological. (Lovelock, 1991, pg. 11) Theology‹from the Greek telos ("purpose")-asserts that there is purpose and design in nature. Lovelock and Margulis stopped short of considering this, at least publicly, and denied that they ever proposed that planetary self-regulation was purposeful.

7.5.4 To Fuller, Spaceship Earth was a system, just as the entire universe was. General systems theory postulated that all behaviour of any system is predictable based on analysing statistics and probability-all is determined by patterns that can be reduced to mathematical principles. This can easily be interpreted as a rigid conclusion, akin to some of the more contemporary tendencies towards the "Theory of Everything." The systems theory approach has been the principal target of postmodern critics such as Jean-Francois Lyotard, who addresses this in his seminal work, The Postmodern Condition (1979). Lyotard emphasises the totalitarian tendencies of such theories and the systematic exclusion of differences that do not fit neatly into mathematical statistics‹those elements that do not comply with the system's overall aim are suppressed in order to preserve the ideologically based unity. (Rheingold, 1997, pg. 17.38)

7.5.5 Fuller of course was a futurist, in love with prediction. He surrounded himself with charts, graphs, statistics, and made it his life work to detect universal patterns. Recognising the seductive power of reducing everything to one truth, and keeping in mind both Ingber's essay and the discovery of the Buckminsterfullerene, my intuition would opt to reside somewhere in the middle of Fuller's predicitionist tendencies and the Postmodern warnings of the totalitarian tendencies of universalism. In this context it is important to consider the second law of thermodynamics, the law of increasing entropy, which holds that any closed system tends probabilistically towards increasing disorder. In his book The Nature of the Physical World (1928), Arthur Eddington said that

7.5.6 The second law of thermodynamics holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwells' equations-then so much the worse for Maxwell's equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation‹well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But, if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation. (Gribbin,1998, pg. 359)

7.5.7 Fuller countered this law with what he called "syntropy," a complementary drive toward increased order: "Entropy is increasing disorder locally, syntropy is increasingly orderly." (Fuller, 1986, pg. 109) He embraced what Von Bertalanffy called the "open system," or a system which acquires energy from the outside, such as a biological organism. Norbert Weiner reformulated the entropy problem by replacing energy with information, which he called "negentropy." Again intuitively, I would position myself somwhere in the middle and think of biological systems as information and embrace disorder which may be but one option. The "systems" are designed to work together with the underlying laws of nature, which we are only privy to parts of. It is the job of information architects to work with the information encoded in the physical or information architecture. The maintenance and performance optimisation of designed "systems" allows for use of energy, or information, to fight off the inevitable entropy. Fuller's model was based on cybernetic notions of self-regulating feedback loops, in which information is always gathered and fed back into the system to adjust its performance. Ultimately, any art work, no matter how disorganised, any philosophy, even postmodernism, is a system of sorts which requires maintenance and hopefully is open to sustain frequent change and adjustments to changes of other, related systems. In other words, open systems, which are designed to change in unpredicted ways, ensure a longer lifespan for themselves. Where the imposed organisation ends and self-organisation begins and how much of it allows for something else to evolve, something which is not necessarily in our control, is the critical question. [top]