In keeping with his emphasis on a dynamic conception of design issues, Fuller was concerned to keep track of long-term trends, as shown for instance in Ecological Geometry. Another product of this approach is his Profile Of The Industrial Revolution, which charts the "rate of acquisition of the basic inventory of cosmic absolutes - the 92 elements".
The chart is reproduced in Synergetics, in the Reader, and in Earth Inc., where he discusses its significance as an instrument of navigation.
Bertalanffy (1973, p.24) discusses the idea that,
"the rate of acceleration of social change is itself accelerating so that in many cases not a logarithmic but a log-log acceleration will be found in social change".
Inasmuch as such rates are counter-intuitive, they belong to the set of phenomena referred to here as invisibles.
© Paul Taylor 2001