The second Buckminster Fuller Challenge was held in 2009. The LDI Director was part of the ProtoMetrics™ submission team (Fisk, Motloch & Venegas; CMPBS Team: Fisk-Vittori, Gill-Auklakh, Fowler, Miller, Ellis, Morton & Blackmon; TAMU Team: Mendez, Taylor & Vaughn; TAMU Support: Neuman & Naderi).
The ProtoMetrics™ submission -- selected as a Semi-Finalist -- was proposed as a framework for data gathering and pattern finding; a toolkit for sharing sustainable development information and methods a global peer review context for decision-making; a converged physical/digital space for discussing, analyzing and resolving local and global problems; and a global network of bioregional laboratories for prototyping physical and digital simulations as vehicles for accelerating understanding of diverse problems and place-based solutions.
The ProtoMetrics™ submission is an excellent example of LDI partnering in its efforts to help convert the massively accelerating information that confronts decision-making today into a sustainability knowledge system (SKS). Like other LDI initiatives, it takes a whole system approach to facilitate the four crucial and interconnected dimensions of the sustainability knowledge system including sustainability knowledge-generation, knowledge-application, knowledge-management, and knowledge diffusion.