a big one as in a metaphor by Buckminster Fuller where he compared his practice to a “trimtab”; a small piece of the rudder that manages to turn a large ship around.
Truly, this is a small change initiative, and perhaps naïve in its challenge, but Fuller also suggested practitioners should “dare to be naïve” (Fuller cited in Zung 2001: 60).
Fuller referred to the function of a trimtab in nautical and aeronautical design to demonstrate how small amounts of energy and resources applied precisely at the right time and place can produce the maximum advantage in a change.
This naivety must not be an immature blindness where everything should only happen in the small scale and where it is only the small scale that counts. The small must deliberately be matched with the big, the big scale and the big change. The small must coexist in the framework of the big. The small change must allow, embrace and support the big politics to be done. But the small change efforts must also demand from the big to be allowed room to navigate, to take own initiatives and try out unconventional methods.
When a large ship, such as a tanker, moves through the ocean, it has great momentum and a considerable amount of effort is required to turn the rudder and change the direction of the ship. However, turning the trimtab, the trailing edge of the main rudder, creates a small turbulence allowing the main rudder to turn with less effort, thus slowly pulling the whole ship around. When most change is usually conceived by trying to turn the ship by pushing the bow around, Fuller tried to create change by acting in the small turbulence at the rudder. I saw that by being all the way at the tail of the ship, by just kicking my foot to one side or the other, I could create the ‘low pressure’ which would turn the whole ship. If ever someone wanted to write my epitaph, I would want it to say ‘Call me Trimtab’. (Fuller 1972)
This does not mean that the naivety proposed by Fuller is a form of tunnel vision. Instead it is a new form of critique allowing for more experiments, and it is supportive more than subversive. It is a naïve critique of many YES and MORE rather than a predetermined NO. This requires new alliances and new forms of connecting the big politics with the poetics small change, new ways of intersecting the cathedrals and bazaars.
Small Change, according to Hamdi, is a decentralized practice of enablement and empowerment building capacity instead of providing finished pack-
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