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DESIGN-SCIENCE
Nathan Brown, Ph.D. Candidate, UCLA
January 31, 2008

As part of a dissertation project on contemporary materials science and experimental poetry, this chapter traces the influence of Buckminster Fuller's "design-science" upon models of form and techniques of self-assembly in the nanotechnology industry, and upon the structural "architecture" of Ronald Johnson's important long poem, ARK (1970-1991).  Since Fuller was an instructor at Black Mountain College in the late 1940s, tracking the pertinence of his work to both contemporary technoscience and poetry enables us to re-evaluate the legacy of that mid-century milieu, and to sort out some of the discrepant ways of thinking about form and fabrication that it continues to transmit. 

The broad goal of this particular investigation is to discern the ideological consequences of approaching material form in terms of "design," and to think through the complicity of design with a certain concept of nature.  The chapter thus includes a consideration of the relevance of Emersonian transcendentalism to Fuller's work and to Johnson's poetics, and it concludes by offering a general definition of the "nature poem."