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How Cybernetics Connects Computing, Counterculture, and Design

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How Cybernetics Connects Computing, Counterculture, and Design Walker Art Center — Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia — Exhibit Catalog — October 2015 How cybernetics connects computing, counterculture, and design Hugh Dubberly — Dubberly Design Office — [email protected] Paul Pangaro — College for Creative Studies — [email protected] “Man is always aiming to achieve some goal language, and sharing descriptions creates a society.[2] and he is always looking for new goals.” Suddenly, serious scientists were talking seriously —Gordon Pask[1] about subjectivity—about language, conversation, and ethics—and their relation to systems and to design. Serious scientists were collaborating to study Beginning in the decade before World War II and collaboration. accelerating through the war and after, scientists This turn away from the mainstream of science designed increasingly sophisticated mechanical and became a turn toward interdisciplinarity—and toward electrical systems that acted as if they had a purpose. counterculture. This work intersected other work on cognition in Two of these scientists, Heinz von Foerster and animals as well as early work on computing. What Gordon Pask, took an interest in design, even as design emerged was a new way of looking at systems—not just was absorbing the lessons of cybernetics. Another mechanical and electrical systems, but also biological member of the group, Gregory Bateson, caught the and social systems: a unifying theory of systems and attention of Stewart Brand, systems thinker, designer, their relation to their environment. This turn toward and publisher of the Whole Earth Catalog. Bateson “whole systems” and “systems thinking” became introduced Brand to von Foerster.[3] Brand’s Whole Earth known as cybernetics. Cybernetics frames the world in Catalog spawned a do-it-yourself publishing revolution, terms of systems and their goals. including von Foerster’s 500-page The Cybernetics of Cybernetics, futurist Ted Nelson’s Computer Lib / Dream This approach led to unexpected outcomes. Machines, and designers Don Koberg and Jim Bagnal’s Universal Traveler: A Soft-Systems Guide to Creativity, Systems achieve goals through iterative processes, Problem Solving and the Process of Reaching Goals—as or “feedback” loops. Suddenly, serious scientists were well as several other books about design in this genre talking seriously about circular causality. (A causes B, of visual and topical collage. In addition to being icons and B causes C, and C causes A.) Looking more closely, of counterculture, these works are also early (printed) scientists saw the difficulty of separating the observer examples of hypertext, a term coined by Nelson. In a from the system. Indeed, the system appeared to be a sense, they anticipate the interconnectedness of the construction of the observer. The role of the observer World Wide Web. Nelson’s work on hypertext intersects is to provide a description of the system, which is Pask’s work on conversation theory, and both lay provided to another observer. The description requires foundations for the future of human-computer language. And the process of observing, creating interaction. 1 How cybernetics connects computing, counterculture, and design Social Graph SRI, NLS ARPA Internet of Cybernetics Cedric Price Douglas Engelbart Ted Nelson Tim Berners-Lee and how it connects computing, counterculture, and design MIT Macy Conferences Univ. of Utah PARC Apple Vannevar Bush Gregory Bateson R.D. Laing Ivan Sutherland Alan Kay Bob Taylor Bill Atkinson Julian Bigelow J.C.R. Licklider John Warnock (founded Adobe) Larry Tesler Warren McCulloch, Chair Jim Blinn Margaret Mead Ed Catmull (founded Pixar) Walter Pitts James Clark (founded Netscape) Claude Shannon Heinz von Foerster BCL Whole Earth Catalog Media Lab WiReD Arturo Rosenblueth John von Neumann Ross Ashby Stewart Brand Nicholas Negroponte Kevin Kelly Norbert Wiener Barbara Kuhr Humberto Maturana John Plunkett Gordon Pask Merry Pranksters Brunel University Bertrand Russell Charles Eames Ken Kesey Usman Haque Ranulph Glanville Hugh Dubberly Paul Pangaro Design Methods IIT Institute of Design Design Thinking J. Willard Gibbs Grey Walter Buckminster Fuller Timothy Leary London Conference Chuck Owen UC Berkeley Soft Systems Design Rationale James Clerk Maxwell Marshall McLuhan Gene Youngblood Christopher Alexander Jim Bagnall Stafford Beer Don Koberg Key HfG Ulm Design Patterns Scientists Serge Chermayeff Bruce Archer Fernando Flores Lou Danziger Designers and Architects Gui Bonsiepe Terry Winograd Design Theorists and Critics Computer Pioneers Horst Rittel Counterculture Leaders Personal Connections Google (usually collaborations) William Burroughs Brian Eno Francisco Varela John Rheinfrank Sergey Brin Larry Page Influences (usually publications) Interactive version at http://cybergraph.dubberly.com/ 2 How cybernetics connects computing, counterculture, and design Social Graph SRI, NLS ARPA Internet of Cybernetics Cedric Price Douglas Engelbart Ted Nelson Tim Berners-Lee and how it connects computing, counterculture, and design MIT Macy Conferences Univ. of Utah PARC Apple Vannevar Bush Gregory Bateson R.D. Laing Ivan Sutherland Alan Kay Bob Taylor Bill Atkinson Julian Bigelow J.C.R. Licklider John Warnock (founded Adobe) Larry Tesler Warren McCulloch, Chair Jim Blinn Margaret Mead Ed Catmull (founded Pixar) Walter Pitts James Clark (founded Netscape) Claude Shannon Heinz von Foerster BCL Whole Earth Catalog Media Lab WiReD Arturo Rosenblueth John von Neumann Ross Ashby Stewart Brand Nicholas Negroponte Kevin Kelly Norbert Wiener Barbara Kuhr Humberto Maturana John Plunkett Gordon Pask Merry Pranksters Brunel University Bertrand Russell Charles Eames Ken Kesey Usman Haque Ranulph Glanville Hugh Dubberly Paul Pangaro Design Methods IIT Institute of Design Design Thinking J. Willard Gibbs Grey Walter Buckminster Fuller Timothy Leary London Conference Chuck Owen UC Berkeley Soft Systems Design Rationale James Clerk Maxwell Marshall McLuhan Gene Youngblood Christopher Alexander Jim Bagnall Stafford Beer Don Koberg Key HfG Ulm Design Patterns Scientists Serge Chermayeff Bruce Archer Fernando Flores Lou Danziger Designers and Architects Gui Bonsiepe Terry Winograd Design Theorists and Critics Computer Pioneers Horst Rittel Counterculture Leaders Personal Connections Google (usually collaborations) William Burroughs Brian Eno Francisco Varela John Rheinfrank Sergey Brin Larry Page Influences (usually publications) Interactive version at http://cybergraph.dubberly.com/ 3 How cybernetics connects computing, counterculture, and design Cybernetics is “deeply inter-twingled” (to borrow From 1946 to 1953, the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation Nelson’s magical phrase) with the early development of organized a series of ten conferences “on the workings personal computers, the 1960’s counterculture, and the of the human mind,” originally titled “Feedback rise of the design methods movement, which has Mechanisms and Circular Causal Systems in Biological enjoyed a recent rebranding as “design thinking.” and Social Systems” and later titled “Cybernetics.” A trending topic in the 1960s, cybernetics peaked The conferences brought together participants from about 1970 and crashed—its ideas absorbed into many many fields: “physicists, mathematicians, electrical fields, the origins of those ideas largely forgotten or engineers, physiologists, neurologists, experimental ignored. Today, cybernetics is at once everywhere and psychologists, psychiatrists, sociologists, and cultural nowhere—a science with no home of its own—one anthropologists.”[6] More than twenty-five people effect of a successful multidisciplinary approach. participated, including Gregory Bateson, J.C.R. Licklider, Nevertheless, other effects of cybernetics live on— Warren McCulloch, Margaret Mead, Claude Shannon, perhaps most visibly in continuing discourse about the Heinz von Foerster, John von Neumann, and Norbert nature of knowledge and cognition; about the repre- Wiener. sentation and embodiment of knowledge and cognition In 1948, partly as a result of the early Macy in computers; and about how we interact with Conferences, Wiener published Cybernetics: or Control computers and how we design for interaction. In part, and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. whatever optimism we have for the future of Wiener had been a child prodigy, graduating from high computing—and whatever utopian visions we may still school at age eleven, graduating from college at age hold for organizing all the world’s information and fourteen; and earning an MA and then a PhD in making it universally accessible[4]—have roots in mathematical logic from Harvard at age nineteen. cybernetics. A historical review may help us understand As Wiener later noted, his book was “more or less better where we are, how we got here, and where we technical.”[7] Despite that, Cybernetics caught the might go. attention of the general public, making Wiener famous and resulting in two more popular books about the subject as well as a two-volume autobiography. Cybernetics Wiener used “cybernetics” to describe a new science that “combines under one heading the study Physicists tend to see the world in terms of matter and of what in a human context is sometimes loosely energy. In contrast, the cybernetics community began described as thinking and in engineering is known as by viewing the world in a new way—through the lens control and communication. In other words, cybernetics of information, communications channels, and their attempts to find the common elements
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