omniharmonicDesign Science Studio
Design Science Studio (DSS) is an immersive educational program rooted in Buckminster Fuller’s design science principles, regenerative systems thinking, and what it calls “art that changes history.” A program of habRitual in partnership with the Buckminster Fuller Institute, DSS runs over seven months and brings together a global cohort — called a CoHeart — to incubate projects at the intersection of ecological regeneration, cultural transformation, and systems redesign. Across its first three cohorts, 373 participants from 42 countries have incubated 286 projects.
The program’s significance lies not primarily in its curriculum, which spans regenerative design, bioregionalism, living-systems, traditional ecological knowledge, and imagination activism, but in the community of practice it cultivates. DSS embodies Fuller’s call for a “comprehensive anticipatory design science” — the understanding that systemic crises are not random failures but predictable outcomes of how civilization was designed, and that the response must be to redesign the whole system to work for one hundred percent of life. The program bridges what are often treated as separate domains: art and activism, aesthetics and systems change, creative practice and institutional redesign. As Benjamin Life reflects, DSS provided not new information but permission — permission to understand that creating beauty is not frivolous when systems are collapsing, and that the separation between these domains is itself part of the problem.
The network effects of DSS are significant. Its alumni form a distributed network of practitioners who think in living systems principles, and these networks cascade rather than scale linearly. Ideas cross-pollinate across bioregions and cultural contexts. DSS connects to regeneration as a practical training ground for regenerative practitioners, to commons-governance as a space for incubating governance innovations, and to the broader pattern of cosmolocalism — knowledge flowing globally while implementation remains grounded in place.