The object of this blue book is to provide a rational meta-system of applied alternative design and a set of alternative designs that can be heuristically modeled, modularized and manipulated for real world problem solving in order to broaden substantially the normal operating range and applicability of scientific knowledge, especially beyond the normal academic context. It is to provide a platform for alternative development in directions that are not likewise or otherwise to be explored, and it is based upon the belief that normal science as it is being articulated at the beginning of the 21^st century, is more self-limiting and constrained by the structural relations of society, than it probably should be or possibly could be. Thus, the bluebook is designed with a vision of a truly independent form of science, a form of science envisioned and enunciated by Buckminster Fuller, that can achieve greater possibility regardless of social structural restrictions. Science should neither be a hand-maiden of industry, co-opted and monopolized by elite interests for private profit, nor should it be the exclusive prerogative of central governments, their bureaucratic-administrative funding structures, and they academic priesthoods for purposes primarily of rank and privilege. Science can provide a symbolic foundation for a democracy of knowledge, and is the common, shared purview of every human being. Instead of the trickle down policies of the predominant trends of modernization and global development, we can open the flood-gates of human creativity and potential through broadened applications of science. This is revolutionary, but it is neither unrealistic nor, as a revolution, is it inherently violent except that the violence of human beings tends to make all structural relations and hence changes in such relations, prone to destructiveness.

The forms of alternative development proffered within these pages are part of a grand design based upon the status of knowledge, and especially, of human knowledge in relationship to reality. This form of development that is suggested is not intended to replace or to even disturb necessarily the status-quo of relations as these have already been established in the world. Rather, it is intended to complement preexisting relations in such a manner as to assist and promote a greater range of choice and to reinforce in a positive manner the predominant trends in such a way as to undue or reverse possibly some of the negative consequences of these trends. It is hoped eventually that globalization as we have known it and as it has been pursued in the world in recent decades especially, will soon die a natural death and simply fade into the background of being a minor obscurity. As a complement to the predominant world system, it is intended that the system for alternative development set forth in these pages will augment this system, and in time simply come to increasingly displace the system as a preferred way of life.

Development is inevitable and unavoidable in our modern world, but it makes a very great difference who benefits most and who may suffer from the kinds of changes that development brings. It is not a matter of development versus non-development, which would be regressive as a trend in our world, but a matter of what kind of development we may chose for ourselves. We are told, and a great deal of money is invested into making us believe, that there is only one kind or general direction for development to occur, regardless of whether this is necessarily true or not. What, in the structure of the long run, is also inevitable and unavoidable will be the long term consequences of the choices for the direction of development we make in the short run. Once we ruin a local eco-system by bulldozing it in order to build homes or businesses, there is no bringing back that naturally established system. We cannot return species of life, once they are lost to development, nor can we easily reestablish natural balances or ecological equilibrium in living systems once these have been disturbed and lost.

Thus this bluebook has been designed with the notion of demonstrating in a consistent manner a wider range of choices for pursuing development in the world other than those that may have already been made for us. Such a wider range of developmental choices are certainly there, if we choose, and choose together, to make them.

There is a long-term historical logic of systems that is also inevitable and that must be headed in our calculus of development. If we overpopulate a system or a planet, the negative consequences of this overpopulation are unavoidable. Similarly, if we follow pathways that are logically coherent and that lead to expectable outcomes, then we are virtually guaranteed of achieving long-term success. That we have often made such choices in myopic blindness is evidence by the unintended consequences that have resulted from many of these choices. Few people one hundred years ago foresaw or could have foreseen a general dilemma of global warming or the possibility for nuclear holocaust in the world. Similarly, we are likely to make choices, no matter how reasonable our calculus, based upon unknown and uncertain variables.

What is proposed within these pages are a meta-system of coordinate development projects that articulate upon multiple levels simultaneously. Individual projects are components of a larger kind of system, and it is in reference and relation to this larger system that the purpose and value of these individual projects must be assessed.

The entire basis for meta-systems development from a human standpoint is in recognition that natural human intelligence entails that people may develop adequate and functional expertise in more than one area of knowledge application at a time. There appears to be as well a corresponding integrative intelligence that is developed with intensive involvement of expertise and extension of knowledge about the world, such that this form of integrative intelligence spills over from one domain of expert knowledge into other domains of potential applicability. In other words, integration of knowledge, skills and experience in one area of knowledge application confers the capacity to integrate similar kinds of attitudes and aptitudes in the terms of other knowledge domains. Thus, in the right kind of framework, people become capable of wearing more than one hat at a time, and thus can achieve relatively remarkable levels of integrative development in their own lives and in relation to systems in which they play a part. It thus entails a more flexible articulation of status identities within social institutional frameworks and thus a loosening and broadening of the constraints that govern such frameworks.

At the same time, knowledge integration is formally and informally achieved through alternative systems development with the recognition that knowledge is constituted socially and psychologically as meta-systems, and these serve as important symbolic models and design templates for the articulation, construction and management of real systems. Such knowledge meta-systems may cross disciplinary boundaries to the extent that formal and behavioral patterns associated with conventional domains can be redefined to fit within a cross-disciplinary framework. Thus, a genuine interdisciplinary framework is a non-trivial exercise that goes beyond a simple correspondence of terms and relations between two disciplines, to seek a higher order theoretical integration or framework within which two disciplines may be sufficiently coordinated and integrated.

This possibility in turn permits then the realization for the actual behavioral articulation and construction of alternative systems of development in real and concrete terms, and this process, if inaugurated, can become the platform for the growth of entirely new patterns of development than hitherto achieved. These are ambitious dreams and goals coming as they are from the keyboard of an obsolete laptop and from an overused and underpaid middle-aged brain, but they are not the less realistic or possible for it.

Human relations and social structural patterning are by far the greatest obstacle to achieving alternative development that exists before us. Changing the nature and structure of these kinds of relationships, especially in a nonviolent and nondestructive manner, is both easier and more difficult to achieve than many may think, and this is the grand paradox of achieving alternative development in the world. It is not just that values and behaviors are deeply ingrained in people and their situations in the world, it is that the current system as it articulates, and wherever it articulates, exists with its own sense of functional equilibrium, and changing structural relationships will alter the equilibrium of such systems. Altered equilibrium generally tend to result, at least in the short-term, in destructive patterns of interference developing in complex systems, and the perturbation of the system by critical events with unpredictable outcomes. Thus, resistance to change has in a sense a natural if not quite rational basis of reinforcing a basic sense of security in a symbolic and behavioral manner of people. Most societies tend to be quite conservative in core areas of their cultural integration, and these societies rely heavily upon the central conservativeness to maintain a sense of coherence and solidarity to the system.

Thus, human changes to a human system, to be effective and long-lasting, must occur at a level and depth that affects the core equilibrium of any system, and that permits people to reform basic behavioral patterns, relations and corresponding attitudes to be in synch with one another.

To be effective, no system of alternative development, even if based upon a central design template, can proceed in a dramatic, all at once manner, but must be promoted slowly and safely in relation to the general system in which it develops.