Fuller Futures Festival at SIU
A Bucky week in Carbondale, Illinois
There was a buzz in the air as I got out of the van after the two hour ride from Lambert International in St. Louis. As fate would have it, Mark Smith from the Design Science Studio (DSS) was on the same flight as me and he graciously offered me a seat in his shuttle to Carbondale.
We happened to pull up just in time for Ari Lazer and Roxi Shohadaee from DSS to greet us out front of the Airbnb, embracing with a warmth that felt good after a long day of travel. They welcomed us through the side gate to the pool house and the adjacent rooms we would be staying in, where I had the pleasure to meet more of the DSS crew, Eve and Mage.
Within an hour, we were eating hors d'oeuvres and drinking wine under the big tree next to the pool with the hosts of the property and a large group of people associated with the weeks festivities.
I knew that Fuller had taught at SIU Carbondale and that his original dome home was somewhere nearby, but it hadn’t occurred to me that Bucky was still a prominent figure in this small college town. The garden party participants, many of whom were locals, shared stories of Bucky and we learned that he had swam in the pool we partied next to as well as held one of the attendees in his arms when she was a baby.
The tree glowed as Thomas Zung, an architect who worked closely with Fuller in the 70s, stood up and gave a short speech about his writings, his relationship with Bucky and the tremendous week we had ahead of us. You see, we were all in town for the Fuller Futures Festival, a four day event on the SIU Campus as well as at the Fuller Dome Home Museum.
We were an eclectic group of people with diverse skills and careers, from city council members to architects, materials scientists, engineers, artists and designers of all kinds. I finally had the pleasure of meeting Kurt Przybilla and Patricia Ravasio in person after years of collaboration and friendship online; we each spoke briefly about our work on the impromptu tree stage.
Elizabeth Donoghue, the Assistant Director of the Honors Program at SIU, led the Fuller Futures event here in Carbondale for 2026 after the very fruitful 2025 event in Edwardsville at the Fuller Dome with Benjamin Lowder. She closed our circle with some inspired words that gave us all hope in the future of design science on campuses.
Finding someone who knows of Buckminster Fuller is rare these days, so to be in attendance with forty or so members of a community that were not only interested in this work, but also worked with Fuller in some cases, was highly encouraging. I couldn’t help but feel emboldened by the strong undercurrent of design scientists, artists, engineers, architects, and lifelong learners that are curious about Fuller’s call to make the world work for everyone.
Just as I thought the party was ending, there was a procession onto the street and we all walked a few blocks to Bucky’s Dome home. I had no idea we were so close to the dome that Fuller lived in, so this impromptu parade was a delightful surprise. The dome is much smaller than I expected and before I knew it, we were crossing the threshold to its inside. Of course Elizabeth and Mike Chervinko happened to be board members of the Fuller Dome Home Museum and had the keys to the dome and gave us a tour. I am so grateful for the work they are doing to preserve Fuller’s legacy in Carbondale and I look forward to their new visitors center being fully built and activated.
From the Library of Congress Historic Building entry:
This geodesic dome was the home of visionary engineer Buckminster Fuller and his wife Anne. It illustrates his architectural philosophy and was the only dome his family lived in or owned anywhere in the world. Six of Fuller’s patents were issued with this address and, reportedly, twelve of his books were published during Anne and Bucky’s residence in the Dome Home.
What transpired over the next 7 days for this crew of designers of all ages1 was a cascade of insightful conversations, activities, galleries, parades and plays that dazzled the imagination and encouraged the participants to envisage an omni-integrated world that leverages more life support, using less resources.
Synergetics University was attending Fuller Futures with the support of Benjamin Lowder and the Fuller Dome at SIU Edwardsville as well as Elizabeth’s considerate programming for the festival. Their support allowed us to continue our mission of documenting this important work, creating educational resources and building relationships with inspired trimtabs.
I spent the week shooting video for our documentary about Synergetics and Design Science, capturing interviews and glimpses of the activities between my engagements. This doc aims to archive the important voices in the world of Synergetics and Design Science, so stay tuned.
THE FESTIVAL BEGINS
Medard Gabel and Thomas Zung started the festival with back-to-back presentations to a meager but mighty audience. Even with the light attendance and very few students, I felt an inspired integrity about the group that was undeniably gravitational. It felt like the growing tide before full moon and we were all surfers, cosmic fishers at dawn.
Gabel and Zung both worked closely with Fuller and are some of the most knowledgeable and historically significant people in the study of design science. It felt vitally important to witness their speeches about designing with consideration. Gabel’s speciality is Fuller’s ‘World Game’ and he told many beautiful stories about the bond he shared with Bucky. Today, he continues the work with his NewWorld Game. Thomas Zung has authored multiple books on this work, including Buckminster Fuller: Anthology for the New Millennium. It was a blessing to witness these first hand accounts of Fuller’s collaborators and the passage of time felt ever more palpable as their talks came to an end.
I rushed out of the conference hall to see a group of around 25 students gathered around Kurt Przybilla between the library and another brutalist looking building on campus. They were broken into groups, each using rubber bands to secure small bamboo struts that formed miniature models of the larger bamboo structure they were about to construct. Kurt was giving instructions on how the reciprocal frame and tensegrity worked, which the students (mostly Forestry and Architecture majors) seemed to comprehend and replicate rather quickly. I had to leave before the 20 foot diameter dome was complete, but I returned later for a glimpse of the structure that would remain on campus for an undetermined amount of time (as long as possible, I hope).
I left the dome builders to film a panel with Medard Gabel, Patricia Ravasio, Nyhl Henson and Doria Cordova who shared their first hand experiences with Fuller and how it shaped their work. I did my best to remain present as I prepared for my own panel talk right after.
I had the pleasure of sitting down with Ilija Rasovic, a materials scientist at the University of Birmingham, and Jamey Webster, an independent researcher, for a talk about our work on Design science and Synergetics. We had a lively conversation that was full of audience questions and general probing of what Synergetics and Design Science looks like in a modern context. I felt humbled to sit with such brilliant minds as Ilija and Jamey, our talk really lit me up and gave me a feel for how rich the week was going to be.
We ended the first day with a fun and festive puppet parade through campus to a domed shelter by the lake, where a horn band played, food trucks pumped out tacos and Ari Lazer showcased his giant polyhedra lanterns. This was the perfect end to a full day of Bucky-inspired presentations and left me wondering how to cultivate more youthful enthusiasm around this work.
The Fullest Four Days : April 22–26, 2026
The week was too full for me to recount in this newsletter. I captured many snippets on film, so I will leave some of the storytelling to future content. Here’s an outline of the memorable moments from the rest of the week:
Benjamin Lowder led a World Game workshop with a large Dymaxion Map on the floor for participants to stand on. The world game was Bucky’s answer to War Gaming and its mission was:
"Make the world work for 100% of humanity, in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation, without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone."
Over the span of a few hours, people had a transformative, engaging, tangible experience of the challenges we face on a global scale. They were asked to be curious about how cooperation can lead us into an age of omni-considerate, inter-accomodating, spontaneously regenerative actions as a species. Ben skillfully prompted the group while his assistant used AI to generate challenges and news updates for the progression of the storyline, using live data from the groups interactions. It was a fun thought experiment that sparked significant and important conversations about our presence here on earth and the impacts that our resource-hungry needs have on global ecosystems and wellbeing.
Thomas Zung donated a tensegrity model to SIU collections and gave a short talk after a great presentation by Roxi and Ari on the Design Science Studio. By this time, we were all feeling rather cohesive as group of die-hard Trimtabs. Peter Meisen led a great discussion and participatory experience about the world energy grid called the Sim Center. I had a few brief chats with Curt McNamara, who I had known for years online through his Trimtab book club and other Fuller groups. There were many other talks and panels that I unfortunately missed.
I had the pleasure of attending one of the most engrossing and entertaining performances I have seen in a long time at the Varsity Theater in Carbondale. It was a one-man play called ‘The History and Mystery of the Universe’ by D.W. Jacobs. It chronicles Bucky’s life and discoveries in such a tactful and deeply considerate way. I was pleasantly surprised by the quality and skill of the performance by Jon-Michael Rutter as a young Bucky.
At the entrance to the Varsity theater was a series of large art prints designed by me (Synergetics University) and sponsored by the BFI and the Design Science Studio. I saw them again as I walked into the Varsity some days later for a panel I was on with Bucky himself (Jon-Michael Rutter). We were joined by a nice fellow named Brian Wilson who presented on the similarities between Bucky and the experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage. It was a lively talk moderated by Ben Lowder, who prompted us to share our work. I had the opportunity to share the trailer for the Doc that Dante and I are putting together.
There are odes to Bucky everywhere in Carbondale, it was truly refreshing to feel like his ideas were still colorfully trimtabbing our eyes toward nature’s coordinate system in unsuspecting southern Illinois. I went on a mural tour with a group of Fuller Futurites and we got to see some really creative odes to Bucky. Late one evening, we came across a dome with a labyrinth in it, there were dome cookies in the coffee shop… how had I been so clueless as to the existence of this vibrant little town?
In the days leading up to the Design Science Studio’s Making the Invisible Visible Salon that would close the festival on Sunday, I played a small supporting role in the creation of sixteen or so large cardboard Vector Equilibria for the stage. I was amazed how quickly we all transformed the Northlight studio into a very cozy and interesting conference center and streaming studio. Roxi, Ari, Mage, Eve, Mark, Zahra, Mony, Doc, George, Elle, Shannon, Jalen and many others pulled off a truly huge feat of showcasing DSS Cohort members and their work. I was in awe of how seamless the whole production went for 15 hours straight with such a small team. We ended up jamming and waxing poetic till the wee hours in the makeshift gallery, with a small crew of us closing out the night.
A ripe cherry on top of the Fuller Future Sundae.
It gave me hope in our shared future. We had reached a quorum of design thinking and synergized an experience that left us all changed for the better. Almost everyone I talked to was enamored by what transpired over the four days at SIU. It was small and I would love to see it reach more young people, but I see the event as a great success. I co-created a lot of beautiful, shared memories with people. I hope that the conversations and relationships sparked at this event will have a beneficial and lasting impact on our communities.
I hitched a ride back to St. Louis with two young gentlemen named Peter Meisen and Jeff Perlis and we stopped by the Fuller Dome on the Edwardsville campus to meet up with Benjamin, just in time for the tornado sirens to go off. The dome happened to be a tornado shelter, so I wasn’t concerned as Benjamin answered interview questions and they assembled the dymaxion floor map for a timelapse. Ben has put together a great team of students and facilitators there and he is doing a great job bringing life and attention to Fuller’s ideas for people of all ages. I cant wait to go back!
The swirling of everything we went through that week culminated in my plane almost being pulled off the runway by another surge of the tornado, grounding us for over a half hour to wait out the storm. When we finally took off, I thought of the trimtab and how grateful I was for the thousands of engineers and brilliant minds that led to me safely embarking… back home.
The oldest was perhaps the 93 year old Thomas Zung and the youngest was perhaps one of the college freshmen that attended