Starting from the decade before World War II and accelerating during the war, scientists designed increasingly complex mechanical and electronic systems that operated as if they had a purpose. This work intersected with other studies on animal cognition and early work on computation. A new way of viewing systems emerged—not just mechanical and electrical systems, but also biological and social systems: a unified theory of systems and their relationship with the environment. This shift towards "whole systems" and "systems thinking" is known as cybernetics. Cybernetics constructs the world from the perspective of systems and their goals.
This approach led to unexpected results.
Systems achieve goals through iterative processes or "feedback" loops. Suddenly, serious scientists began to seriously discuss circular causality. (A causes B, B causes C, C causes A.) Upon closer observation, scientists saw the difficulty of separating the observer from the system. In fact, the system seemed to be a construct of the observer. The role of the observer is to provide a description of the system, which is then provided to another observer. Descriptions require language. The processes of observing, creating language, and sharing descriptions create a society. Suddenly, serious scientists began to seriously discuss subjectivity—about language, dialogue, and ethics—and their relationship with systems and design. Serious scientists were collaborating on the study of collaboration.
This deviation from mainstream science turned into a shift towards interdisciplinary and countercultural movements.
Two of the scientists involved, Heinz von Foerster and Gordon Pask, were interested in design, even as design drew lessons from cybernetics. Another member of the organization, Gregory Bateson, caught the attention of Stewart Brand, a systems thinker, designer, and publisher of the Whole Earth Catalog. Bateson introduced Brand to von Foerster. Brand's Whole Earth Catalog sparked a self-publishing revolution, including von Foerster's 500-page The Cybernetics of Cybernetics, futurist Ted Nelson's Computer Lib/Dream Machines, designer Don Koberg and Jim Bagnal's Universal Traveler: A Soft-Systems Guide to Creativity, Problem Solving and the Process of Reaching Goals, and several other design books featuring visual and thematic collage styles. Besides being a hallmark of counterculture, these works were also early (print) examples of hypertext, a term created by Nelson. In a sense, they anticipated the interconnectedness of the World Wide Web. Nelson's work on hypertext intersected with Pask's work on conversation theory, both laying the groundwork for the future of human-computer interaction.
Cybernetics is "deeply inter-twined" with the early development of personal computers, the rise of countercultural movements in the 1960s, and the design methods movement, which has recently been renamed "design thinking."
Cybernetics was a hot topic in the 1960s, peaking around 1970, with its ideas absorbed by many fields, the origins of which have largely been forgotten or overlooked. Today, cybernetics is a ubiquitous science, a result of successful multidisciplinary approaches.
However, other influences of cybernetics remain—perhaps most notably the ongoing discourse about the nature of knowledge and cognition; the manifestation and embodiment of knowledge and cognition in computers; and how we interact with computers and design interactions. To some extent, no matter how optimistic we are about the future of computation—no matter what utopian fantasies we hold about organizing all the information in the world and making it universally accessible—they are rooted in cybernetics. Looking back at history can help us better understand our current situation, how we got to where we are today, and where we might be headed.
Cybernetics#
Physicists tend to view the world from the perspective of matter and energy. In contrast, the cybernetics 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—before the era of digital communication and media—linking humans with machines, systems, and each other. Cybernetics focuses on using feedback to correct errors and achieve goals. It originated in neurobiology and was practically applied during World War II to develop automatic control systems for ships, aircraft, and missiles.
Historian Fred Turner notes that cybernetics did not emerge "out of thin air." It was initially a multidisciplinary endeavor. In 1943, engineer Julian Bigelow, physiologist Arturo Rosenblueth, and mathematician Norbert Wiener contributed to the founding paper Behavior, Purpose, and Teleology published in the journal Philosophy of Science.
After World War II, the United States enjoyed a euphoric sense of possibility driven by technology, including sending humans to the moon, creating artificial intelligence, and eliminating poverty. The Allies triumphed over the challenge of fascism—seemingly through superior science, technology, and planning (such as radar, code-breaking, and the atomic bomb), as well as 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, initially titled "Feedback Mechanisms and Circular Causal Systems in Biological and Social Systems," later renamed "Cybernetics." The conferences gathered participants from many fields: "physicists, mathematicians, electrical engineers, physiologists, neurologists, experimental psychologists, psychiatrists, sociologists, and cultural anthropologists." More than 25 people attended, including Gregory Bateson, J.C.R. 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 Macy conferences, Wiener published Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. Wiener was a child prodigy, graduating high school at 11 and college at 14; he received a master's and Ph.D. in mathematical logic from Harvard at 19. As Wiener later pointed out, his book was "more or less technical." Nevertheless, cybernetics captured public attention, bringing Wiener fame and leading to 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 "combines the study of what is sometimes loosely described as thinking in the human environment with the study of what is called control and communication in engineering. In other words, cybernetics attempts to find the common elements in the operation of automatic machines and the human nervous system and to develop a theory that covers the whole field..." Wiener noted that because "this complex idea had no ready-made word... I felt I had to invent one. Thus, the word 'cybernetics,' which I derived from the Greek word kubernetes or 'steersman,' which is the same word as our 'governor.'"
The steersman responds to winds, tides, and other disturbances, correcting these "errors" to keep his ship on course. Mechanical and electronic governors do the same thing. In fact, governors are so successful that they have become ubiquitous—thermostats' bimetallic coils expand and contract to switch on the furnace, maintaining room temperature; a toilet's float valve keeps the tank's water level; a car's cruise control system maintains a nearly constant speed up and down hills.
Wiener framed the relationship between information and response as a key element, whether in humans or machines:
"When I communicate with another person, I transmit an information to him, and when he communicates with me, he returns a related information, which contains information primarily accessible to him, not to me... When I give a command to a machine, the situation is not essentially different from when I give a command to a person. In other words, as far as my consciousness is concerned, I know the command that has been issued and the signal of obedience that has returned. For me personally, the fact that the intermediate stage of the signal is transmitted through a machine rather than a person is irrelevant and does not greatly alter my relationship with the signal. Thus, control theory in engineering, whether human, animal, or mechanical, is a chapter in information theory."
Also in 1948, Claude Shannon published a related work A Mathematical Theory of Communication. Shannon's theory of communication gave us the modern concepts of "information" and "noise." His concept of information is similar to Wiener's.
In 1945, Shannon's teacher Vannevar Bush (who had become President Roosevelt's science advisor) published As We May Think, a seminal article in the history of human-computer interaction. Bush's article is famous for describing the "Memex," a machine for "building trails" through information that foreshadowed the emergence of hypertext and the World Wide Web. However, Bush wrote this article out of concern that as knowledge and work became increasingly specialized, "researchers are overwhelmed by the discoveries and conclusions of thousands of other workers—conclusions they have no time to comprehend, let alone remember." He also added that the danger is that "… truly important achievements are lost in the shuffle of the unimportant."
While Bush's Memex conceptualized a method for exploring related data through machine means, the communication and understanding issues among researchers across knowledge domains remained. The Macy conference participants expressed similar concerns to Bush; they also believed, as von Foerster said, that "one can and must attempt to communicate across boundaries, often crossing the chasms that separate different sciences." Thus, they were attracted to "not just believing in the value of interdisciplinary discussion." If a shared conceptual model applicable to solving many scientific problems could be found, then "by recognizing the usefulness of these models, we could glimpse a new scientific lingua franca..."
In such a universalizing theory, shared conceptual models would force a reconsideration of disciplinary perspectives, as Gordon Pask said, cybernetics "holds that economics is not the economist, biology is not the biologist, and engines are not the engineer. In each case, the subject is the same: how systems self-regulate, self-replicate, evolve, and learn." From an interdisciplinary perspective, Pask believed the highlight of cybernetics is how they (systems) organize themselves.
Turner's conclusion is that the impact of this interdisciplinary discussion and the development of shared control models "left each participant with a profound systems orientation and a habit of deploying information and systems metaphors back in their professional domains. In this way, the Macy conferences helped transform cybernetics into one of the dominant knowledge paradigms of the postwar era."
As discussions matured, the goals of the cybernetics community expanded. In 1968, Margaret Mead began to consider applying cybernetics to social issues:
"As the world expands, in a scientifically increasingly specialized world, the possibility of using cybernetics as a form of communication continues... We should take a very serious look at the state of American society, in which we hope to develop methods for these very complex processing systems that indeed need attention. The problems of urban areas, ... the interrelationships between levels of government, the redistribution of income, ... the necessary connections between parts of large industrial complexes..."
However, deep down, there may have been a grander goal. Mead's first husband, Gregory Bateson, reported that what excited him about the early discussions of cybernetics was that "it was a way to solve the problem of purpose. Since Aristotle, final causes have been a mystery... We did not realize at the time (at least I did not, although [Macy conference chair] McCulloch may have) that for recursion, the entire logic had to be reconstructed."
Second-Order Cybernetics#
Heinz von Foerster edited the official records of the Macy cybernetics conferences. In the introduction, he humorously noted, "…the unified effect of certain key issues of concern to all members: the problem of communication and self-integration mechanisms. Surrounding these concepts is the communication about communication."
Von Foerster also pointed out in early drafts that with the new "conceptual models" of cybernetics, entities of higher complexity could be penetrated. Processes such as stability, adaptation, perception, memory and recognition, prediction, information, and learning could all be successfully studied. As early as 1952, von Foerster was laying the groundwork for "second-order" cybernetics—meta-cybernetics, self-cybernetics, or cybernetics of cybernetics.
The idea of applying cybernetics to itself first appeared in a story told by Margaret Mead about attending the General Systems Theory Society meeting in 1955. "I suggested that rather than just establishing another society, they should consider how to use their theories to predict the types and scales of the societies they wanted and how their growth patterns and connections to other parts of the scientific community should be." In 1968, she reiterated her suggestion to the American Society for Cybernetics, "Why can't we see this society as a system...?"
Mead added in a 1972 interview with Stewart Brand that "at the end of the GST meeting, I went to talk to Ashby, and he said, 'You mean we should apply our principles to ourselves?'" In the same interview, Bateson explained, "Computer science is input-output. You have a box... Science is the science of these boxes. The essence of Wiener's cybernetics is that science is the science of the whole loop... Essentially, your ecosystem, your organism plus environment, is viewed as a single loop... and you are part of a larger loop." Brand summarized: The engineer is outside the system, Wiener is inside the system. In other words, Bateson's engineer envisioned the observer as independent of the system, while cybernetics began to see the observer as part of the system.
Von Foerster later summarized this shift in this way: First-order cybernetics is "the science of observed systems," while second-order cybernetics is "the science of observing systems." In 1975, Brand's Point Foundation funded the publication of von Foerster's The Cybernetics of Cybernetics with proceeds from the Whole Earth Catalog.
In describing this new "second-order" cybernetics, von Foerster first introduced the dynamism of observation, which challenges the "objectivity" of traditional scientific models. Chilean biologist Humberto Maturana said, "Anything is said by an observer." Maturana's early career profoundly influenced biology and cybernetics, and his later career is now influencing our understanding of human social systems. Maturana's starting point is evident: anything said must come from a person's mouth. This means that what a person says can only come from their perspective, that is, an inherent subjective position from which they express and convey what they "see."
Maturana's statement embodies the stance of second-order cybernetics that all experience is constrained by a person's particularity. This statement provides a basis for logical argumentation, inevitably leading to the conclusion: only subjectivity, "objectivity" itself is a structure.
He emphasizes what the observer says—the role of language—is a perennial theme of second-order cybernetics. In his paper "Metadesign," Maturana states, "We humans... exist in the form of language. That is to say, we exist in the processes of living together, in the recursive coordination of behavior, and language is such... I call the consistent weaving of language and emotion dialogue."
Maturana's interest in humans "living in dialogue" is not unique within the cybernetics community. For example, Gordon Pask proposed his "Theory of Conversations" to study how humans and machines learn. Dialogue is clearly a feedback, corrective, and evolutionary cyclical process; dialogue can also be about dialogue, which is a second-order framework. Bernard Scott wrote, "Second-order cybernetics attempts to explain the observer to itself. This is indeed the goal of conversation theory."
Von Foerster, Maturana, and Pask delineated the subjective observer from ethics. As von Foerster pointed out, Pask distinguished between two types of orders: "one is the observer entering the system by specifying the system's purpose," and the other is "by specifying one's own purpose." Because he can set his own goals, "he is autonomous... (responsible for his actions)."
Maturana echoed the same theme: "If we know that the reality we live in is produced by our emotions, and we know that we know, we will be able to act according to our awareness of the reality brought about by our liking or disliking of our lives. That is to say, we must take responsibility for what we do."
Maturana expanded the concept of agency, placing the responsibility for our desires, emotions, language, dialogue, and technology entirely on ourselves. "We humans can do anything we want to do... but we do not have to do everything we can imagine; we can choose, and that is the importance of our behavior as socially aware beings." We are responsible for the world we live in. We are responsible for our designs.
Cybernetics and Computing#
One of the roots of cybernetics is neurobiology, and the Macy conferences were initially organized to explore "the workings of the human brain." According to Scott, Ashby pointed out in 1961 that the question "What is the mind?" should be answered by second-generation cybernetics, just as the first generation answered the question: "What is the brain?" The brain greatly interested scientists in the field of cybernetics. Four books are about this topic: Ross Ashby's Design for a Brain, Stafford Beer's Brain of the Firm, John von Neumann's The Computer and the Brain, and Grey Walter's The Living Brain. All four were interested in creating machines with brain functions. These devices were all "computational"—though they were not all what we typically think of as computers today. Rather, many cybernetic machines pointed to an alternative computational path, even as cybernetics influenced the mainstream.
Ashby made an important distinction between traditional artificial intelligence (AI) approaches and cybernetic approaches, stating, "For some, the key test of whether a machine is a 'brain' is whether it can 'think.' But for biologists, the brain is not a thinking machine; it is an acting machine; it acquires information and then does something." Sociologist Andrew Pickering described this distinction using two cognitive modes: the dominant performance-based "modern" philosophy of knowledge and the "non-modern" mode of knowing (acting in the world), the latter being a central aspect of cybernetics.
If cybernetics was born at the Macy conferences, it was conceived in the Radiation Laboratory at MIT, 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 Macy conferences included computing pioneers Claude Shannon, J.C.R. 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 demonstrated how Boolean logic—setting all values to true or false in binary form—was embodied in switches and laid the groundwork for digital computers. Shannon later supervised Ivan Sutherland's 1962 doctoral thesis, which produced 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. at the University of Utah with Sutherland and developed the concept of Dynabook around 1972—a portable tablet "for children of all ages." Later, at Stanford University's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Kay and Stewart Brand became friends and continued working at the digital pioneer Xerox PARC and Apple.
Licklider became a professor at MIT in 1950. He played a significant role in establishing U.S. government funding for computer research, ultimately leading to the emergence of the internet. In his 1960 paper Man-Computer Symbiosis, he envisioned interactive computing. "This would involve a very close coupling between human and electronic members of the partnership. The main objectives are 1) to let computers enhance programming thinking... and 2) to enable humans and computers to cooperate in decision-making and controlling complex situations." PARC founder Bob Taylor noted that Licklider's paper "provided a guide for computer research for the next several decades." In 1968, Licklider published The Computer as a Communication Device. The first sentence of the book set the tone: "In a few years, people will be able to communicate more effectively through machines than face-to-face."
Another connection between cybernetics and computing is the Biological Computing Laboratory (BCL) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. BCL stood in stark contrast to the more traditional digital computing laboratories at Oxford University. In 1958, electrical engineering professor Heinz von Foerster founded BCL; it operated until 1974 and attracted many leading thinkers in cybernetics: Ashby served as a professor at BCL from 1961 to 1972; Pask was a visiting professor from 1960 to 1961; Humberto Maturana visited in 1967-68. BCL conducted research in "cybernetics, systems theory, bionics, ... parallel computing, neurophysiology, biological logic, artificial intelligence, symbolic computation... and self-organizing systems."
The concept of biological computing is not merely metaphorical. Beer, Pask, and others attempted to "develop" computers. Their approach had practical foundations. They realized that some problems were too complex to express; they believed that natural systems might be induced to embody this complexity. Andrew Pickering stated, "Beer believed that ecosystems are smarter than we are—not because they have representational cognitive abilities, which people might think do not exist, but because they can solve problems beyond our cognitive capabilities."
In the 1960s, BCL established several prototypes "that could be described as 'perceptual machines'." Prototype design was common in the cybernetics community—Turner referred to it as a "rhetorical strategy," a way to raise awareness and expand influence. Perhaps the first cybernetic prototype was the anti-aircraft predictor created by Wiener and Bigelow, which "not only simulated the behavior of aircraft but also the probabilistic nature of biological, mechanical, and various social systems. Ashby's steady-state simulated self-regulating processes observable in biology and society." Grey Walter created light-seeking robots called "tortoises." Pask built a series of "chemical computers," "Musicolour" (a device that produced light effects while conversing with human musicians), "Colloquy of Mobiles" (an interactive light-seeking device), and a series of interactive teaching devices.
Pask stayed in Illinois for another year—this time at Chicago Circle—where he shared an office with Ted Nelson on the same floor, and the two began a dialogue. Nelson proposed an egalitarian view in his 1974 book Computer Lib/Dream Machines, arguing that the future of computing is built on new forms of reading and writing. Nelson wrote, "Pask is reducing a field to an extremely formal relationship structure." Nelson summarized: "… this perfectly complements the hypertext concept I have been spreading for years."
Pask also collaborated with Nicholas Negroponte on his architecture machine project and wrote the introduction for Negroponte's 1975 book The Soft Architecture Machine. Negroponte's Architecture Machine Group later became the Media Lab—a space for simulating human-computer interaction. Stewart Brand spent three months there writing a book about the lab and its prototypes.
Of course, Brand was no stranger to computers. In 1968, at the Joint Computer Conference, Douglas Engelbart demonstrated the Online System, and Brand suggested installing and operating cameras, which introduced many interface structures that became central to personal computing. In 1972, Brand published an interview with Mead and Bateson, and that same year he published Space Wars in Rolling Stone, 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, attributing the rise of personal computers to counterculture.
Cybernetics and Counterculture#
Cybernetics is connected to counterculture on several levels. Perhaps most obviously, there is an interest in the brain and thought, which led to experiments with stroboscopes and biofeedback effects. On another level, as Andrew Pickering pointed out, cybernetics was simply "quirky"—with chemical and biological computers, synthetic brains, and interactive art pieces—developing outside traditional academia and corporate sponsorship, in the spare time of its practitioners, on an "amateur" basis. However, at a more fundamental level, cybernetics also questioned the basic assumptions about how we organize the world. As Pickering noted, cybernetics challenged traditional dualism through experimentation, "threatening the modern boundaries between mind and matter, creating a breakthrough, for example, where engineering can penetrate psychology and vice versa." Pickering further noted that cybernetics offered an alternative to the dominant reductionist and "framed" culture, a holistic, "revealing" stance—an "openness to possibilities."
Turner points out that "Brand began to see cybernetics as a framework of knowledge and a social practice; he linked both to different forms of community organization." Brand moved between several communities—and interconnected—cybernetics (Bateson, Mead, and von Foerster), computing (Engelbart, Kay, Nelson, and Negroponte), and of course counterculture (Ken Kesey, the Merry Pranksters, and other communities).
John Markoff documented "how the counterculture of the 1960s influenced the personal computer industry"—focusing on the use of psychedelics in Silicon Valley, he described Brand and Engelbart's experiments with psychedelics. According to Ted Nelson, psychedelic guru Timothy Leary introduced him to Heinz von Foerster. Pask also seemed to have a serious amphetamine addiction. And von Foerster was a nudist (which was one reason he and his wife lived in the woods near Pescadero).
Brand's introduction to Bohemian culture began earlier when he served as a "military photographer" in the army. In his spare time, he learned about the New York art scene and connected with USCO (an artist collaborative organization where he also worked as a photographer). Brand noted, "The artists I collaborated with in New York from 1961 to 1964 were all carefully reading Wiener's work."
Cybernetics began to gain popularity when computers were first used to create images. Two exhibitions showcased related works. The 1968 London ICA's first "Cybernetic Serendipity: Computers and Art" included Pask's Colloquy of Mobiles and Beer's Stochastic Machine (SAM), while a few months later, the Museum of Modern Art in New York's "The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age" showcased works from Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T), including an article by Jeff Raskin, who later became a founding member of the Apple Macintosh team.
Also in 1968, Stewart Brand published his first Whole Earth Catalog—a bible of counterculture—a collection of commentary and suggestions providing "access to tools," promising "intimate, personal power... the power of individuals to self-educate, find their own inspiration, shape their environments, and share their adventures with anyone interested." Decades later, Steve Jobs summarized the Whole Earth Catalog as: "… one of the bibles of our generation... all done with typewriters, scissors, and Polaroid cameras. It was a bit like a paperback Google, 35 years before Google: it was idealistic, full of clever tools and great ideas." Like search engine giants, the Whole Earth Catalog served as a text-based browser or window to a world gathering products, books, devices, and ideas that were not directly sold through catalogs but effectively created a community or user network—like-minded members of counterculture.
Cybernetics and Design#
In addition to being a utopian toolbox for counterculture and a self-publishing manifesto for self-help lifestyles, the Whole Earth Catalog also served as an introduction to systems thinking and design.
The first section of the catalog, "Understanding Whole Systems," juxtaposes comments by Buckminster Fuller and Heinz von Foerster on mathematician Spencer Brown's Laws of Form, followed by biologist D'Arcy Thompson's On Growth and Form and architect Christopher Alexander's Notes on the Synthesis of Form, along with a sidebar on von Foerster's Purposive Systems. Next is commentary on artificial intelligence pioneer Herbert Simon's Sciences of the Artificial and Ludwig von Bertalanffy's General Systems Yearbook. The next page features commentary on Wiener's The Human Use of Human Beings. This is just the first few pages.
The Whole Earth Catalog is a bibliography that also reviews other classic works on design and cybernetics, including those by John Chris Jones, Victor Papanek, Ross Ashby, Warren McCulloch, Nicholas Negroponte, Lawrence Halprin, Gyorgy Polya, George Miller, and others. Today, it remains a great reading list for graduate students studying design theory and systems theory.
How did this happen?
Brand said, "While an undergraduate, I saw a talk by Charles Eames that deeply moved me." Brand studied magazine design at Stanford University in 1959 and graphic design at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1960. Turner believes Buckminster Fuller's concept of the "integrative designer" attracted Brand. In Fuller's view, the integrative designer is "an emerging synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist, and evolutionary strategist." By this definition, Brand's lifelong work may serve as a good example of integrative design.
The idea of multidisciplinary design flourished in the Eames Office (1941), George Nelson Associates (1947), Total Design (1963), Unimark (1965), Pentagram (1972), and other practitioners. At the postwar Ulm School of Design (HfG), Wiener taught there in 1955, and they referred to this holistic or general approach as "environmental design." American schools adopted this concept and nomenclature, most notably the University of California, Berkeley, which transformed its College of Environmental Design into a modernist school of environmental design. In 1963, as part of the transformation, Dean William Wurster hired the two founders of the design methods movement, Horst Rittel and Christopher Alexander.
Horst Rittel had taught courses in operations research and cybernetics at the University of Ulm. His first work was a series of lectures published in 1958 titled Communication Theory in Sociology (Cybernetics). At Berkeley, Rittel's design methods course explicitly included concepts from cybernetics. His writings linked cybernetics and design, describing design as a cybernetic process. Furthermore, Rittel viewed this process as a contentious conversation, and his work in framing this conversation initiated an ongoing research area known as design principles (processes for making design decisions and software systems to support and document those processes). Rittel's "second-generation design methods" echoed second-order cybernetics. Beer's views on extremely complex systems, their ever-changing nature, and their ultimate unknowability closely aligned with Rittel's views on "wicked problems," or those that resist solutions due to the complexity of solutions and stakeholders not sharing a common reference frame.
In 1964, Christopher Alexander published his Harvard architecture doctoral thesis Notes on the Synthesis of Form. According to Pickering, Alexander took Ashby's brain design (which he repeatedly cited) as the "foundation" of his thesis. "The key concept he derived from Ashby was precisely that of adaptation; his argument was that unconscious architecture is, in many ways, well-adapted architecture: the relationships between its internal parts, the relationships between its material environment, and the social existence of its inhabitants... In the field of self-aware design, the attempt to correct the consequences of maladaptation is endless."
In turn, Alexander's work laid the foundation for Charles Owen's famous "structured planning" course at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), which formed the backbone of IIT's unique systematic design approach for over 30 years. Owen reported that he "obtained Alexander's punched card computer program from MIT. After a month of work, we got the program running on IIT's mainframe." Owen also attended meetings of the American Society for Cybernetics. In contrast, Pask and Heinz von Foerster attended meetings of the design community.
Heinz von Foerster spoke several times in the design community, including at the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA) in 1962 and the International Design Conference in Aspen the same year, as well as delivering a talk titled "Cybernetics of Design" at North Carolina State University in 1963. Design critic Ralph Caplan also spoke at the IDSA conference, stating, "What impressed me most about this conference was undoubtedly von Foerster's brilliant talk; I liked his talk, but perhaps did not understand it. As for what he was doing at the IDSA conference, that is not surprising. Von Foerster knew everything about design and everything else." As Caplan pointed out, Serge Chermayeff, who had served as dean of the design school, taught architecture at Harvard, and collaborated with Alexander, also spoke at the same IDSA conference, and he and von Foerster became "close friends for many years."
Design as Cybernetics#
Ashby and Alexander framed design in terms of adaptability, fitness, and evolution, meaning that design is a feedback process. However, design is not just about moving toward 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 contrasted the way design solves problems with Ashby's evolutionary and execution methods: "I have always thought that design should follow the route of rational planning—setting a goal and then achieving it through some intelligent computation. In contrast, cybernetics points us to a concept of design that is thrown into a dynamic world we cannot control, which always surprises us... Cybernetics can highlight these emergencies (rather than treating them as unfortunate side effects) and utilize them, enjoying them!"
In 1962, both Alexander and Pask attended the first design methods conference held at Imperial College London. Pask also held a visiting position at the Architectural Association, where he collaborated with architect Cedric Price on the "Fun Palace," an unbuilt but influential flexible space design, a massive structure co-created with theater director Joan Littlewood. In 1969, Pask published The Architectural Relevance of Cybernetics, explicitly defining design as cybernetics. He anticipated Donald Schön's view of design as a dialogue concept (described in his 1983 book The Reflective Practitioner), going further than Horst Rittel and others who described design as a cybernetic process.
Cybernetics, through its systems-based approach, integrates environment and relationships, pushing design beyond its object-based approach. The initial framework of cybernetics concerning systems and goals, followed by the second-order cybernetics framework of subjectivity and dialogue, produced a view of design that considers design to be more important than the form of objects.
Pask pointed out, "A building cannot be viewed in isolation. It only makes sense as part of the human environment. It interacts with its inhabitants, serving them on one hand while controlling their behavior on the other. In other words, the structure makes sense as part of a large system containing human components, which architects primarily focus on; they (not just bricks and mortar) are what architects design." What Pask said about architecture also applies to the design of human-computer interaction. Software programs interact with their "users," serving them while also constraining their behavior. Software, too, only makes sense as part of a larger system containing humans. These larger systems are what interaction designers design.
While Turner links the early development of cybernetics with the development of personal computers and the internet, he largely overlooks the significance of cybernetics for software design (which remains the case today). In many ways, the story of cybernetics is the prehistory or background story of interaction design (thus its successors like service design and experience design). Wiener's concept of feedback is foundational to interaction design and thus to any design framework that positions humans as participatory rather than simply imparting form to objects. Bush, Engelbart, Sutherland, Licklider, Kay, and Nelson contributed articles, works, and prototypes that set the agenda for interaction design and continue to be required reading (and viewing) for students and practitioners. You could also include Ashby, Beer, Humberto Maturana, Pask, and von Foerster on this list.
As Pask pointed out, "architects are primary system designers," but they lack "a supporting and unifying theory... cybernetics is a discipline that fills the gap." Pask's student Ranulph Glanville viewed cybernetics as both theory and practice, "We can think of design as a practical manifestation of cybernetics, with cybernetics being a theoretical study that supports design." Glanville's student Usman Haque added a contemporary interpretation and conclusion: "Building systems constructed by Paskian strategies allows us to challenge traditional modes of architectural production and consumption that strictly differentiate designers, builders, clients, owners, and pure inhabitants... It is about design tools that people can use to construct—broadly speaking—their environments, thereby constructing their own agency awareness."
A Language for the Future#
With their "monstrous" prototypes and their Frankenstein-like publications, many cyberneticians were not just scientists. They were designers and hackers. Do-it-yourself pranksters. Drugged dreamers. Hypertext hippies—moving us from Memex to Mosaic (the browser). They accelerated desktop publishing. They laid the groundwork for human-computer interaction, paving the way for interaction design.
As they turned their attention to second-order cybernetics and dialogue, they created evidence of "integrative design"—a design approach still evolving, focusing on interactions between people. In doing so, they gave us hope for the future—hope that we can work together to save the whole Earth.
In the past two decades, design has begun to catch up with cybernetics. Design practice has integrated into systems and ecology. Collaboration and interdisciplinarity have become key themes. More importantly, we now recognize that the major issues facing the world—the truly important issues—are all systemic issues. They are wicked problems, meaning they are inherently political and cannot be "solved" by experts. In Horst Rittel's words, we are caught in a "symmetry of ignorance." The only way forward is through dialogue. These facts give new meaning to cybernetics, as it provides tools and models, just as it did at the Macy conferences—to address systemic issues and the unknowable "chaos" we face—a universal language of design. As Pask pointed out: "The difficulties arising from interaction between people are the main sources of difficulty, and only through cybernetic thinking can these difficulties be overcome."
Adapted from an article by Dubberly Design Office (DDO) from 2015—How cybernetics connects computing, counterculture, and design