Future by design is a 90 minute movie on DVD about Jock Fresco, with many of his drawings models and concepts animated by computer graphics and models of his work displayed with interview segments between various topics including mega-engineering structures with a high percentage of machine automation.

Fresco lacked the resources to carry out his ideas and considered himself a futurist.

He defines being a futurist, “all thoughts and actions based on what tomorrow could be.”

He met Albert Einstein who showed him a glass slide of pond water under the microscope and said, “Everything is fighting everything else.”

The scientific and humanities are just tools that should and must work together make the future.

Like many people who were alive during the great depression in the 1930's, Mr. Fresco thought the rules of the game were screwed up.

He wanted to know why people accepted a single or certain belief system. Once people or society adopts a belief system they do not change. Once technology creates a product or service-they want to surpass it. This is his basic idea.

He noticed that everything is changing and evolving. Mr. Fresco wanted a fair and equitable society. He did not see it, so he went to the South Seas. In stark contrast to the values of America, in the South Seas he noticed individual values were based on senseless opinion, dogma and myth.

Jock Fresco served in WW2, and after the war created the trend home. He noticed that inventions have to be made public and functional before they are backed by investors. Without the money he would invent in mass and file the inventions away in a file cabinet.

In the 1970’s he created the Venus Project, 10 buildings designed to intergrate nature and advanced technology. He took a bare piece of land and made ponds and streams. The project was designed to show the outskirts of one of his ideas,  entire cities planned with function and usability from the beginning using a circular town center and various functions of the city radiating out from a community center.

Mr. Fresco said that we need intelligent management of the earth's resources, a method of coping with problems and decisions based on empirical science and away from opinion and myth.

Paraprhased from his own words, “People today are exposed to methods of evaluation ( and systems) that have been long rendered obsolete. Yet we use them every day....ie opinions to make decisions,  not based on using the scientific process.,”

His basic message is that we can design and build a far better environment.

The basis of technology is to provide a high standard of living. Technology is useless if  it does not improve peoples lives. People are conditioned to serve the interests of an established culture.

Anything that is beyond the comprehension of people, people invent reasons for the phenomena, even if those reasons are untrue. According to Jock, “this is why people invent gods, demons, and tell stories.”

The amount of superstition is in direct opposition to the amount of information people have.

People need good relationships. He would like to see most if not all decision making transferred to machine. When you go to the fish store, you do not ask the owner how much your purchase costs, the owner does not give you his opinion about the cost of what you want to buy, the store owner uses a machine, a scale. By using machines, we assign human decision making to the machine. Decision making by machine is far more accurate. Jock goes on to elaborate, “designers can create machines that do a task faster-better than the designer could perform the task by the designer doing the task himself. For example a bottle processing plant, like coke-a-cola. The designer could not fill the bottles as fast as the machine can.. ”

Connect up the computers - you create a nervous system that creates and maintains dynamic equilibrum between production and distribution of goods and services w/o money.

The government is earth itself.

There are better ways to spend our time than trying to make money or manage money or trying to figure out how to make more money or trying to sell goods or services.

The aim of future by design is to elevate humans to their highest potential.

Worth a rental. The computer graphics of Mr. Fresco’s work are great.