How cybernetics connects computing, counterculture, and design

Beginning in the decade before World War II and accelerating during the war, scientists designed increasingly complex mechanical and electronic systems that functioned as if they had a purpose. This work intersects with other work on animal cognition as well as earlier work on computing. A new way of looking at systems—not just mechanical and electrical systems, but biological and social systems—has emerged: a unified theory of systems and their relationship to their environment. This shift to "whole systems" and "systems thinking" is known as cybernetics. Cybernetics constructs the world in terms of systems and their goals.

This approach led to unexpected results.

The system achieves its goals through an iterative process or "feedback" loop. Suddenly, serious scientists are seriously talking about circular causality. (A leads to B, B leads to C, C leads to A.) Looking more closely, scientists see the difficulty of separating the observer from the system. In fact, the system appears to be a construct of the observer. The role of an observer is to provide a description of the system, which is provided to another observer. Description requires language. The process of observing, creating language, and sharing descriptions creates a society. Suddenly, serious scientists are seriously talking about subjectivity—about language, dialogue, and ethics—and how they relate to systems and design. Serious scientists are collaborating on research collaborations.

This departure from mainstream science became an interdisciplinary and countercultural shift.

Two of these scientists, Heinz von Foerster and Gordon Pask, were interested in design, although it was learning the lessons of cybernetics. Another member of the group, Gregory Bateson, caught the attention of Stewart Brand, a systems thinker, designer and publisher of the Whole Earth Catalog. Bateson introduced Brand to von Forster. Brand's Whole Earth Catalog sparked a self-publishing revolution, including von Foster's 500-page The Cybernetics of Cybernetics , futurist Ted Nelson Nelson's Computer Lib/Dream Machines , designers Don Koberg and Jim Bagnal's Globetrotter: Creation Universal Traveler: A Soft-Systems Guide to Creativity, Problem Solving and the Process of Reaching Goals , and several other books on this type of visual and thematic collage style design books. Besides being icons of the counterculture, these works are also early (print) examples of hypertext, a term coined by Nielsen. In a sense, they foresaw the interconnectedness of the World Wide Web. Nielsen's work on hypertext intersects with Pask's work on conversation theory, and both lay the groundwork for the future of human-computer interaction.

Cybernetics was "deeply inter-twingled" with the early development of the personal computer, the counterculture of the 1960s, and the rise of the Design Methods movement, which was recently renamed "Design Thinking" .

Cybernetics was a hot topic in the 1960s, peaking around 1970, and its ideas were absorbed into many fields whose origins were largely forgotten or ignored. Today, cybernetics is a ubiquitous science, the result of a successful multidisciplinary approach.

However, other influences of cybernetics remain—perhaps most notably the ongoing discourse on the nature of knowledge and cognition; on the representation and manifestation of knowledge and cognition in computers; and how we interact with and design interactions with computers . To some extent, however optimistic we may be about the future of computing—whatever utopian fantasies we may have about organizing all the information in the world and making it universally accessible—it is rooted in cybernetics. Looking back at history can help us better understand where we are now, how we got here, and where we might be headed.

Cybernetics

Physicists tend to see the world in terms of matter and energy. In contrast, the cybernetic community began to see the world in a new way—through the lens of information, communication channels, and their organization. In this way, cybernetics was born at the dawn of the information age—the pre-digital communication and media age—that connects humans with machines, systems, and interactions with each other. Cybernetics focuses on using feedback to correct mistakes and achieve goals. It has its origins in neurobiology and was practically used to develop automatic control systems for ships, aircraft and artillery shells during World War II.

The historian Fred Turner points out that cybernetics did not arise "out of thin air." It was originally a multidisciplinary activity. In 1943, the engineer Julian Bigelow, the physiologist Arturo Rosenblueth, and the mathematician Norbert Wiener participated in the writing of Action, Purpose, and Teleology (Theory of Action, Purpose, and Teleology). Behavior, Purpose, and Teleology) ; and published in the journal Philosophy of Science.

After World War II, America enjoyed a technology-inspired euphoria that anything was possible, including putting a man on the moon, creating artificial intelligence, and eradicating poverty. The Allies overcame the challenges of fascism and prevailed - seemingly through superior science, technology, and planning (such as radar, code-breaking, and the atomic bomb), but also through "systems thinking," such as operations research and cybernetics.

From 1946 to 1953, the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation organized a series of ten conferences "on the workings of the human mind," originally titled "Feedback Mechanisms and Circular Causal Systems in Biological and Social Systems", later titled "Cybernetics". The conference brought together participants from many fields: "physicists, mathematicians, electrical engineers, physiologists, neurologists, experimental psychologists, psychiatrists, sociologists and cultural anthropologists." More than 25 people Attended the event including Gregory Bateson, JCR Licklider, Warren McCulloch, Margaret Mead ), Claude Shannon, Heinz von Foerster, John von Neumann and Norbert Wiener .

In 1948, partly as a result of the early Massey Conference, Wiener published Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine . Wiener was a child prodigy, graduating from high school at 11 and college at 14; at nineteen he earned a master's and doctorate in mathematical logic from Harvard. As Wiener later pointed out, his book was "more or less technical." Nonetheless, cybernetics caught public attention, propelling Wiener to fame and resulting in the publication of two more popular books on cybernetics, as well as a two-volume autobiography.

Wiener used "cybernetics" to describe a new science that "brings together what is sometimes loosely described as thinking in the human environment and what is known in engineering as control and communication. In other words, control On trying to find the common elements of the workings of automatic machines and the human nervous system, and to develop a theory that covers the whole field..." Wiener noted that since "there is no ready-made word for such a complex idea... I felt compelled to invent a So the word "cybernetics", which I derived from the Greek word kubernetes or "steersman", which is the same word we call "governor" word.

The helmsman reacts to wind, tide and other disturbances, correcting these "mistakes" and keeping his boat on course. Mechanical and electronic governors do the same thing. In fact, governors have been so successful they have become ubiquitous—the thermostat’s bimetallic coils contract and expand to switch the stove on and off to keep the temperature in the room; the toilet’s float valve keeps the tank level. ; The car's cruise control maintains an almost constant speed uphill and downhill.

Wiener identified the relationship between information and response as a key element, both in humans and machines:

"When I communicate with another person, I pass him a message, and when he communicates with me, he returns a relevant message that contains information that is primarily accessible to him, not me... When I give When a machine gives orders, the situation is not fundamentally different than when I give orders to a person. In other words, as far as my consciousness is concerned, I know the orders that have been issued and the signals of obedience that have come back. Personally, the fact that the intermediate phase of the signal is delivered by a machine rather than a human is irrelevant, and doesn't change my relationship to the signal drastically in any way. So control theory in engineering, Whether it's human, animal, or mechanical, it's a chapter in information theory."

Also in 1948, Claude Shannon published a related book , A Mathematical Theory of Communication . Shannon's theory of communication gave us our modern concepts of "information" and "noise". His concept of information is similar to Wiener's concept of information.

In 1945, Shannon's teacher Vannevar Bush (who had become President Roosevelt's National Science Advisor) published "As We May Think ," a seminal article in the history of human-computer interaction. Bush's article is best known for describing "Memex," a machine for "building trails" through information that heralded the advent of hypertext and the World Wide Web. Bush, however, wrote the article because he feared that with the increasing specialization of knowledge and work, "the researcher was stunned by the discoveries and conclusions of thousands of other workers that he could not find the time to grasp, Let alone remember.” He added that the danger is “…the really important accomplishments are lost in the midst of the unimportant.”

Although Bush's Memex conceptualized ways to explore relevant data by machine means, problems of communication and understanding among researchers across knowledge domains remain. Massey attendees expressed the same concerns as Bush; they also believed in what von Foerster said, "One can and must try to communicate across borders, and often across the chasm that separates different sciences. .” So they were drawn to “more than just believing in the value of interdisciplinary discussions.” If shared conceptual models that apply to many scientific problems can be found, then "by recognizing the usefulness of these models, we can glimpse a new lingua franca of science..."

In such a generalized theory, shared conceptual models would force a reconsideration of disciplinary perspectives, as Gordon Pask put it, cybernetics "thinks that economics are not economists, and biology is not biologists , the engine is not an engineer. In each case, its themes are the same, namely how systems self-regulate, self-replicate, evolve and learn." From an interdisciplinary perspective, Pask believes that cybernetics "brings the point that they How (the system) organizes itself”.

Turner concluded that the impact of this interdisciplinary discussion and the development of a model of shared control "has brought each participant back to their profession with a deep systems orientation to their work and a habit of deploying information and system metaphors. In this way, the Massey Conference helped transform cybernetics into one of the dominant intellectual paradigms of the postwar era."

As the discussion matured, so did the goals of the cybernetic community. In 1968, Margaret Mead started thinking about applying cybernetics to social problems :

"As the world expands, and in a world where science is increasingly specialized, the possibility of using cybernetics as a form of communication continues... We should take a very hard look at the current state of American society, where we hope that The ways in which these very complex processing systems can be developed in the midst of the The necessary connection between…”

Deep down, however, there may be a grander purpose. Mead's first husband, Gregory Bateson, reports that what got him excited about the early discussions of cybernetics was, "It was the solution to the problem of goals. Beginning with Aristotle, The ultimate reason has always been a mystery... We didn't realise at the time (at least I didn't realise, although [McCulloch] may have realised) that the whole logic had to be restructured in order to recurse."

Second-Order Cybernetics

Heinz von Foerster edited the official records of the Messianic Conference on Cybernetics. In his introduction, he jokingly states, "...the unifying effect of certain key issues of concern to all members (of the conference): the problem of communication and self-integration mechanisms. Surrounding these concepts is communication about communication." ."

von Foerster also noted in an early draft that, with a new "conceptual model" of cybernetics, "entities of higher complexity can be infiltrated. Stabilization, adaptation, perception, recall and recognition, prediction, Processes such as information, learning, etc., can be successfully studied.” As early as 1952, von Foerster was laying the foundations for “second-order” cybernetics—meta-cybernetics, ego-cybernetics, or control Control Theory in Theory.

The idea of applying cybernetics to oneself first appeared in a story told by Margaret Mead at a 1955 meeting of the Society for General Systems Theory. "I suggest that instead of just building another society, they should think a little bit about how they can use their theory to predict the type and size of society they want, and how it should grow and connect to the rest of the scientific community. ." In 1968, she reiterated her advice to the American Cybernetics Society, "Why can't we think of this society systematically as a system...?"

Mead added in a 1972 interview with Stewart Brand, "At the end of the GST meeting, I went to talk to Ashby and he said, 'You mean we should apply our principles to On yourself?'" In the same interview, Gregory Bateson explained, "Computer science is all about input-output. You have a box...Science is the science of those boxes. The essence of Wiener cybernetics is, Science is the science of the whole circuit...essentially, your ecosystem, your organism plus the environment, is seen as a single circuit...and you are part of a larger circuit." Outside, Wiener is inside the system. In other words, Bateson's engineers envisioned that the observer could be independent of the system, and cybernetics has begun to treat the observer as part of the system.

Von Forster later summarized the transition in this way: first-order cybernetics is "the science of observed systems", while second-order cybernetics is "the science of observed systems" science of observing systems). In 1975, Brand's Point Foundation used the proceeds from the Whole Earth Catalog to fund the publication of von Forster's The Cybernetics of Cybernetics .

In describing this new "second-order" cybernetics, von Forster first addressed the dynamics of observation, which called into question the traditional scientific model of "objectivity." "Everything is said by the observer," said Chilean biologist Humberto Maturana . Maturana's early career profoundly influenced biology and cybernetics, and his later Occupations are now influencing our understanding of human social systems. Maturana's point of departure is obvious: Anything that is said must come from a person's mouth. This means that what a person says can only come from his point of view, that is, an inherently subjective position from which she expresses and communicates what she "sees".

Maturana's statement embodies the second-order cybernetics position that all experience is subject to the particularity of one person. This statement provides the basis for a logical argument that inevitably leads to the conclusion that there is only subjectivity, and "objectivity" itself is a structure.

His emphasis on what the observers say—the role of language—is an eternal theme of second-order cybernetics. In his paper "Metadesign", Maturana said, "We humans...exist in the form of language. That is, we exist in the process of living together, in the recursive coordination of behavior, That's what language is... I call the coherent weave of language and emotion a conversation."

Maturana's interest in humans "living in dialogue" is not unique to the cybernetic community. For example, Gordon Pask proposed his "Theory of Conversations" to study how humans and machines learn. Dialogue is clearly a cyclic process with feedback, correction, and evolution; dialogue can also be about dialogue, which is a second-order framework. Bernard Scott writes, "Second-order cybernetics attempts to explain the observer to itself. This is indeed the goal of dialogue theory."

Von Forster, Maturana, and Pask draw the line between the subjective observer and ethics. As von Foster pointed out, Pask distinguishes between two orders "one by which the observer enters the system by specifying its purpose" and the other "by specifying its own purpose". Because he can set his own goals, "he is autonomous... [responsible for his actions]."

Maturana echoes the same theme: "If we know that the reality of our lives arises through our emotions, and we know that we know, we will be able to make decisions based on what we like or dislike about the reality that our lives bring. Consciousness to act. That is, we are responsible for what we do.”

Maturana expands on the concept of agency, placing the responsibility for our desires, emotions, language, dialogue and technology entirely on us. "We humans can do whatever we want...but we don't have to do everything we imagine, we can choose, and that's the importance of our behavior as socially conscious people. We are responsible for the world we live in. . We are responsible for our own designs.

Cybernetics and Computing

One of the roots of cybernetics is neurobiology, and the Massey Conference was originally organized to explore "how the human brain works." According to Scott, Ashby pointed out in 1961 that the second generation of cybernetics should answer the question "what is the mind", just as the first generation answered the question "what is the brain" ". The brain is of great interest to scientists in the field of cybernetics. There are four books on the subject: Design for a Brain by Ross Ashby, Brain by Stafford Beer of the Firm , The Computer and the Brain by John von Neumann, The Living Brain by Grey Walter . All four were interested in building machines with brain functions. These devices are all "computing" -- although they're not all computers as we commonly imagine them today. Instead, many cybernetic machines point to another computational path that has not been taken, even as cybernetics influences the mainstream.

Ashby makes an important distinction between traditional artificial intelligence (AI) approaches and cybernetic approaches, "For some, the key test of whether a machine is a 'brain' is whether it can 'think'. But for biologists The brain is, say, not a thinking machine, but an action machine; it takes in information, and then does something." Sociologist Andrew Pickering describes this distinction in two ways of cognition: the dominant A "modern" philosophy of knowledge based on performance and a "non-modern" way of knowing based on behavior (acting in the world), the latter being a central aspect of cybernetics.

If cybernetics was born at the Massey Conference, it was conceived at MIT's Radiation Laboratory, where Wiener worked. The Radiation Laboratory was established by Vannevar Bush. During his early years at MIT, Wiener worked closely with Bush, as did Shannon, who worked on differential analyzers in Bush's lab from 1936 to 1940.

The Massey Conference included computer pioneers Claude Shannon , JCR Licklider and John von Neumann , who invented the basic computer architecture still in use today , and pioneered the fields of game theory and cellular automata.

Shannon's 1937 master's thesis showed how Boolean logic -- the binary form that sets all values to be true or false -- was embodied in switches and laid the foundation for digital computers. Shannon later directed Ivan Sutherland's 1962 doctoral dissertation, which gave rise to Sketchpad, an early computer-based drawing system and one of the first real-time interactive computer systems. Sketchpad influenced Alan Kay, who pursued his Ph.D. with Sutherland at the University of Utah and developed the Dynabook concept around 1972—a portable tablet "for children of all ages" computer. Later, at Stanford University's Artificial Intelligence Lab, Kay became friends with Stuart Brand and went on to work at digital pioneers Xerox Park Research Center (PARC) and Apple.

Licklider became a professor at MIT in 1950. He was instrumental in establishing U.S. government funding for computer research that eventually led to the Internet. He envisioned interactive computers in his 1960 paper Man-Computer Symbiosis . “This will involve very tight coupling between the human and electronic members of the partnership. Its main purpose is to 1) allow computers to facilitate procedural thinking… and 2) allow humans and computers to cooperate in decision-making and control of complex situations.” PARC Founder Bob Taylor noted that Licklider's paper "provided a guide for the next decades of computer research." In 1968, Licklider published The Computer as a Communication Device . The first sentence of the book sets the tone: "In a few years, people will be able to communicate more effectively through machines than face-to-face."

Another link between cybernetics and computing is the Biological Computing Laboratory (BCL) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. BCL stands in stark contrast to Oxford University's more traditional digital computing laboratory. In 1958, electrical engineering professor Heinz von Foerster founded BCL; it operated until 1974, attracting many of the leading thinkers of cybernetics: Ashby between 1961 and 1972 Professor at BCL; Pask was a visiting professor from 1960 to 1961; Humberto Maturana visited in 1967-68. BCL conducts research in "cybernetics, systems theory, bionics,...parallel computing, neurophysiology, biological logic, artificial intelligence, symbolic computing...and self-organizing systems".

The concept of biological computing is more than a metaphor. Bill, Pask and others tried to "evolve" computers. There is a practical basis for their approach. They realized that some problems were too complex to express; they thought natural systems might be induced to embody this complexity. Andrew Pickering said, “Bill thinks ecosystems are smarter than us—not because of their ability to represent cognitive abilities, which one might think doesn’t exist, but because they solve problems beyond our understanding. The ability to know the problem of ability.”

In the 1960s, the BCL built several prototypes that "could be described as 'sense machines'". Prototyping is common in the cybernetic community — what Turner calls a “rhetorical strategy,” a method of raising awareness and expanding influence. Perhaps the first cybernetic prototype was Wiener and Bigelow's air defense predictor, which "simulated not only the behavior of aircraft, but also the probabilistic properties of biological, mechanical, and various social systems. Ashby's steady-state simulation self-regulation processes that can be observed in biology and society." Grey Walter built the light-seeking robot "turtle". Pask built a series of 'Chemistry Computers', 'Musicolour' (a device that produces lighting effects while talking to human musicians), 'Colloquy of Mobiles' (a light-seeking interactive device) and a series of Interactive teaching equipment.

Pask stayed another year in Illinois — this time at Chicago Circle — where he and Ted Nelson had an office on the same floor, where the two began a conversation. Nielsen, in his 1974 book Computer Lib/Dream Machines, developed an egalitarian view that the future of computing is built on new forms of reading and writing. Up. Nielsen writes, "Pask is reducing a field to an extremely formal relational structure." Nielsen concludes: "...this complements the hypertext concepts I've been spreading for years."

Pask also worked with Nicholas Negroponte on his architecture machine project and did work for Negroponte's 1975 book The Soft Architecture Machine. introduced. Negroponte's Architecture Machine Group later became the Media Lab - a space that simulates human-computer interaction. Stewart Brand lived for three months and wrote a book about the lab and its prototypes.

Of course, Brand is no stranger to computers. In 1968, at the Joint Computer Conference, when Douglas Engelbart demonstrated the Online System, Brand proposed the installation and operation of the camera, which introduced many of the interface structures that became the core of personal computing. . In 1972, Brand published an interview with Mead and Bateson, the same year he published "Space Wars" in Rolling Stone magazine, predicting the personal computer revolution. In 1985, he co-founded the early online community WELL. In 1995, he published "We Owe It All to the Hippies " in Time magazine, crediting the rise of the personal computer to the counterculture.

Cybernetics and Counterculture

Cybernetics is connected to the counterculture on several levels. Perhaps the most obvious is the interest in the brain and mind, which led to experiments with stroboscopes and biofeedback effects. On another level, as Andrew Pickering has pointed out, cybernetics is simply "weird" - with chemical and biological computers, synthetic brains, and interactive art works - in traditional academic and corporate sponsorship Besides, it was developed on an "amateur" basis in the free time of its practitioners. At a more fundamental level, however, cybernetics also questions fundamental assumptions about how we organize the world. As Pickering points out, cybernetics challenges traditional dualism through experiments that "threaten the modern boundaries between mind and matter, creating a breach where, for example, engineering can permeate psychology and vice versa. .” Pickering further argues that cybernetics offers an alternative to the dominant reductionist and “framing” culture, a holistic one that “reveals” its position—a “reality to possibility” open" position.

Turner notes, “Brand began to see cybernetics as an intellectual framework and a social practice; he linked both to different forms of community organization.” Brand traveled between several communities— — and interconnected — cybernetics (Bateson, Mead, and von Forster), computers (Engelbart, Kay, Nelson, and Negroponte), and of course, the counterculture (Ken Casey) , Happy Pranksters and other communities).

John Markoff documents "How the 60's Counterculture Influenced the PC Industry" - Focusing on Psychedelic Drug Use in Silicon Valley, he describes Brand and Engelbart's experiment. According to Ted Nelson, psychedelic master Timothy Leary introduced him to Heinz von Foerster. Pask also appears to have a severe amphetamine addiction. And Heinz von Foerster was a nudist (one of the reasons he and his wife lived in the woods near Pescadero).

Brand's introduction to bohemian culture began much earlier, when he served as a "military photographer" in the military. In his spare time, he learned about the New York art scene and made connections with USCO, an artist collaboration where he also worked as a photographer. "The artists I worked with in New York from 1961 to 1964 were perusing Wiener's work," Brand notes.

Cybernetics became popular when computers began to be used to make images. Two exhibitions showcase related works. 1968 ICA London's first "Cynical Discovery: Computers and Art", including Pask's Colloquy of Mobiles and Bill's Random Simulating Machines (SAM), a few months later at the Museum of Modern Art, New York's "End of the Mechanical Age" The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age” showcases work from Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT), including an essay by Jeff Raskin , He was later a founding member of Apple's Macintosh computer team.

Also in 1968, Stuart Brand published his first Whole Earth Catalog - a counterculture bible - a collection of comments and advice that provided "access to tools" The Pathway, promises "intimate, personal power...the power of the individual to educate himself, find his inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventures with anyone who is interested." Decades later, Steve Jobs summed up the Whole Earth Catalog as: "...one of the bibles of our generation...it was all done with typewriters, scissors, and a Polaroid camera. It's kind of like a paperback version of Google, 35 years before Google. Years: It's idealistic, full of nifty tools and great ideas." Like the search engine giant, the Whole Earth Catalog acts as a text-based browser or window to view a collection of products, books, A world of devices and ideas that are not sold directly through the catalog but actually create a community or network of users - like-minded members of the counterculture.

Cybernetics and Design

In addition to being a utopian counterculture toolbox and self-published manifesto for a self-help lifestyle, the Whole Earth Catalog is also an introduction to systems thinking and design.

The first part of the catalog, "Understanding Whole Systems," compares Buckminster Fuller and Heinz von Foerster to mathematicians Spencer Brown ( Spencer Brown's review of Laws of Form, followed by biologist D'Arcy Thompson's On Growth and Form and architect Christopher Notes on the Synthesis of Form by Christopher Alexander, with added sidebar to Heinz von Foerster's Purposive Systems . This was followed by a review of AI pioneer Herbert Simon's Science of the Artificial and Ludwig von Bertalanffy's Universal Systems Review of the General Systems Yearbook . The next page is a review of Wiener's "The Usefulness of Man and Man." This is just the first few pages.

The Whole Earth Catalog is a bibliography that also reviews other design and cybernetics classics, including John Chris Jones, Victor Papanek, Ross A. Ross Ashby, Warren McCulloch, Nicholas Negroponte, Lawrence Halprin, Gyorgy Polya ), George Miller, etc. Today, it remains a good reading list for graduate students in design theory and systems theory.

How did this happen?

"As an undergraduate, I saw a talk by Charles Eames , and I was deeply moved," says Brand, who studied magazine design at Stanford University in 1959 and in 1960 at Studied Graphic Design at the San Francisco Art Institute. Turner credited Buckminster Fuller's concept of an "integrated designer" with Brand. In Fuller's view, the integrative designer is an "emerging complex of artists, inventors, mechanics, objective economists, and evolutionary strategists." By this definition, Brand's life's work may be a good example of integrated design.

The idea of multidisciplinary design was embraced by Eames Office (1941), George Nelson Associates (1947), Total Design (1963), Unimark (1965), Pentagram (1972) and other practitioners prevail. At the Ulm School of Design (HfG) in postwar Germany, where Wiener lectured in 1955, they called this holistic or general approach "environmental design". Schools in the United States introduced the idea and nomenclature, most notably the University of California, Berkeley, which transformed its School of Architecture and Arts into a modernist school of environmental design. In 1963, as part of the change, Dean William Wurster hired Horst Rittel and Christopher Alexander, two founders of the Design Methods movement.

Horst Rittel has taught courses in operations research and cybernetics at the University of Ulm. His first book was a series of lectures published in 1958 entitled "Communication Theory in Sociology (Cybernetics)" . At Berkeley, Ritter's design methods course explicitly incorporates cybernetic concepts. His work links cybernetics and design, and he describes design as a cybernetic process. In addition, Ritter sees the process as a contentious conversation, and his work in framing this conversation has initiated an ongoing area of research known as design principles (the processes used to make design decisions and software systems to support these processes and document them). Ritter's "Second-Generation Design Approach" echoes second-order cybernetics. Bill's views on extremely complex systems, their changing nature, and their eventual unknowability are very similar to Ritter's views on "evil problems," or those due to the complexity of the solution and stakeholders that do not share a Common frame of reference, so resist solutions.

In 1964, Christopher Alexander published his Harvard architecture doctoral thesis, Notes on the Synthesis of Form. According to Pickering, Alexander used Ashby's brain design (which he repeatedly cited) as the "foundation" of his thesis. "The key concept he took from Ashby was the notion of adaptation, and his thesis was that buildings of the unconscious are well-adapted buildings in many ways: the relationship between the parts within them, the relationship between their physical surroundings In the field of self-conscious design, the consequences of trying to correct maladaptation are endless.”

Alexander's work, in turn, was the basis for Charles Irving's famous "structured planning" course for over 30 years at the Institute of Design (ID) at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT). Come, these courses form the backbone of ID's unique systematic approach to design. Owen reports that he "obtained Alexander's punch-card computer program from MIT. After a month of work, we got the program running on the IIT's mainframe." Owen also attended meetings of the American Cybernetics Society. Instead, Pask and Heinz von Foerster attended meetings of the design community.

Heinz von Foerster has spoken to the design community on several occasions, including at the Industrial Design Education Association (IDEA) in 1962 and at the International Design Conference in Aspen that same year, and at the 1963 International Design Conference in Aspen. Lecture entitled "Cybernetics of Design" by North Carolina State University. Design critic Ralph Caplan, who also spoke at the IDEA conference, said, "What impressed me most about the conference was without a doubt von Foster's excellent presentation, I liked his presentation, But probably not. As for what he does at IDEA, it's not surprising. Von Foster knows design and everything else inside the palm of his hand." Serge Chermayeffe, a university professor of architecture and a collaborator with Alexander, who also spoke at the same IDEA conference, and von Foster became "close friends for many years".

Design as Cybernetics

Ashby and Alexander frame design in terms of adaptability, fit and evolution, respectively, that is, design is a feedback process. However, design is not just about moving towards a goal (as in first-order cybernetics); design is also a process of discovering goals, a process of learning what is important (as in second-order cybernetics). Pickering contrasts design as a problem-solving approach with Ashby's approach to evolution and execution: "I've always believed that design should follow the line of rational planning -- formulating a goal and then using some kind of intelligent computing to achieve it. Cybernetics, by contrast, points us to a concept of design thrown into a dynamic world beyond our control that always surprises us... cybernetics can both highlight these emergencies (rather than treating them as unfortunate side effects), and take advantage of them and enjoy them!”

In 1962, both Alexander and Pask attended the first Design Methods Conference at Imperial College London. Pask also had a guest post at the Architectural Society of London, where he worked with architect Cedric Price to design the Fun Palace, an unbuilt but extremely The influential design of flexible spaces is a megastructure he created with theatre director Joan Littlewood. In 1969, Pask published The Architectural Relevance of Cybernetics , which explicitly defined design as cybernetics. He foresaw Donald Schön's conception of design as a dialogue (described in his 1983 book The Reflective Practitioner), Bihorst Ritter Horst Rittel and others who describe design as a cybernetic process go further.

Through its systems-based approach, cybernetics integrates context and relationships, pushing design beyond its object-based approach. The initial cybernetic framework of systems and goals, followed by the second-order cybernetic framework of subjectivity and dialogue, produced a view of design that considered design more important than the form of objects.

Pask points out, “A building cannot be viewed in isolation. It only makes sense as a human environment. It always interacts with its inhabitants, serving them on the one hand and controlling their behavior on the other. In other words, the structure acts as an encompassing human component. part of the larger systems that make sense, and architects are primarily concerned with these larger systems; they (not just the brick and stucco parts) are designed by the architect." Pask's architecture also applies to human-computer interaction design. A software program interacts with its "users", serving them while also governing their behavior. Software, too, only makes sense as part of a larger system that includes humans. These larger systems are designed by interaction designers.

While Turner linked the early development of cybernetics to the development of the personal computer and the Internet, he largely ignored what cybernetics meant (and still does) for software design. In many ways, the story of cybernetics is the past life or backstory of interaction design (hence its successors like service design and experience design). Wiener's concept of feedback, which underlies interaction design, and therefore any design framework, is to treat people as participatory rather than simply giving form to objects. Bush, Engelbart, Sutherland, Licklider, Kay, and Nielsen contributed articles, writings, and prototypes that set the agenda for interaction design and still require students and practitioners to read (and view). You could also include Ashby, Bill, Maturana, Pask and Von Foster on this list.

As Pask pointed out, "architects are the primary system designers", but they lack "a theory of underpinning and unifying... Cybernetics is a discipline that fills the void." Pask's student Ranuf Gran Ranulph Glanville believes that cybernetics is both theory and practice. "We can think of design as a practical manifestation of cybernetics, and cybernetics is a theoretical study that supports design." Glanville's student Osman Hacker ( Usman Haque) adds an episodic and contemporary reading: "The building system constructed by Paskian's strategy allows us to challenge the traditional model of building production and consumption that binds designers, builders, clients, owners and pure occupants to strict Differentiating...it's about designing tools that people can use to build -- in the broadest sense -- their environment and thus build their own sense of agency."

A Language for the Future

With their "monster" prototypes and their Frankenstein-esque publications, many cybernetic people are more than scientists. They are designers and hackers. Do it yourself a prank. Drug-addicted dreamer. Hypertext hippies - moving us from Memex to Mosaic (browser). They accelerated desktop publishing. They laid the foundation for human-computer interaction and paved the way for interaction design.

When they turned their attention to second-order cybernetics and dialogue, they created a proof of existence for "integrated design" - a still-evolving approach to design that focuses on human interaction. By doing so, they give us hope for the future - that we can work together to save the entire planet.

In the past two decades, design has begun to catch up with cybernetics. Design practices have been integrated into the system and ecology. Collaboration and interdisciplinarity have become key themes. More importantly, we now recognize that the major problems facing the world—the ones that really matter—are system problems. They are evil problems, which means they are political in nature and cannot be "solved" by experts. In the words of Horst Rittel, we are caught in a "symmetry of ignorance". The only way forward is through dialogue. These facts give cybernetics new meaning as it provides tools and models, just as it did at the Massey Conference - to solve systemic problems and the unknowable "chaos" we face - A common language for design. As Pask points out: "Human interactions are a major source of difficulties that can only be overcome through cybernetic thinking."

Compiled from: Dubberly Design Office (DDO) 2015 article - How cybernetics connects computing, counterculture, and design