Grounded in contemporary landscape architecture theory and practice, Cybernetics and the Constructed Environment blends examples from art, design, and engineering with concepts from cybernetics and posthumanism, offering a transdisciplinary examination of the ramifications of cybernetics on the constructed environment. Cybernetics, or the study of communication and control in animals and machines, has grown increasingly relevant nearly 80 years after its inception. Cyber-physical systems, sensing networks, and spatial computing—algorithms and intelligent machines—create endless feedback loops with human and non-human actors, co-producing a cybernetic environment. Yet, when an ecosystem is meticulously managed by intelligent machines, can we still call it wild nature? Posthumanism ideas, such as new materialism, actor-network theory, and object-oriented ontology, have become increasingly popular among design disciplines, including landscape architecture, and may have provided transformative frameworks to understand this entangled reality. However, design still entails a sense of intentionality and an urge to control. How do we, then, address the tension between the designer’s intentionality and the co-produced reality of more-than-human agents in the cybernetic environment? Is posthumanism enough to develop a framework to think beyond our all-too-human ways of thinking? For researchers, scholars, practitioners, and students in environmental design and engineering disciplines, this book maps out a paradigm of environmentalism and ecological design rooted in non-communication and uncontrollability, and puts a speculative turn on cybernetics.
Chapters 8 and 9 of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
Table of Contents
Introduction: The Upscaling of the Cybernetic Imagination Part 1: The New Machine in the New Garden 1.A Transformation Formula 2. The Technology-Nature Edge: From Pastoralism to Anthropocene 3. The Human-Technology Edge: From Ready-made Artefacts to Dematerialized Humans 4. The Human-Nature Edge: The Three Waves of “Nature Study” 5. Posthumanism, Co-Production, and Assemblage Part 2: Posthumanism, the Environment and Intelligent Machines 6. Searching for Nonhuman Agency 7. From Nonhuman Agency to Speculative Ontology 8. Coproductive Intelligence Part 3: The Cybernetic Environment 9. Cybernetics and Landscape: From Uncertainty to Opportunity 10. Reframing Cybernetics 11. Sensing as Coding: The Episteme of the Digital Age 12. The Rise of Intelligent Agents: A Non-Model-Centric Paradigm 13. Actuating Leads to Attuning: Cultivated Wildness 14. Cultivated Wildness and Speculative Ecology Conclusion: Design and Cybernetic Environment
Author(s)
Biography
Zihao Zhang is a designer, educator, and scholar in landscape architecture. He currently serves as an assistant professor and interim director of the landscape architecture program at the City College of New York.
SCiO Global mini-Conference and AGM 2024 Sat, Sep 28th, 202409:00 – 14:00 GMT+1
SCiO meeting on Saturday 28th with contributions from Systems Practitioners: Eva de Hullu – Perceptual Control Theory – an ‘inside-out’ approach to systems thinking Miguel Pantaleon – 10 Years of Systems Thinking Practice: Learnings from the Struggle Gavin Roberts – Exploring a multi-agency system – requisite variety, complexity, systems laws and a bit of a whack Joan O’Donnell – Self-organising beings: the art and practice of embodied wisdom and in between those we’ve got the (short!) AGM
Perceptual Control Theory (PCT) provides a general theory of functioning for organisms. At the conceptual core of the theory is the observation that living things control the perceived environment by means of their behavior. Consequently, the phenomenon of control takes center stage in PCT, with observable behavior playing an important but supporting role. The first part of the paper explains how the PCT model works. This explanation includes a definition of “control” as well as the basic equations from which one can see what is required for control to be possible. The second part of the paper describes demonstrations that the reader can download from the Internet and run, so as to learn the basics of control by experiencing and verifying the phenomenon directly. The third part of the paper shows examples of the application of PCT to different areas of psychological research including learning, developmental psychology, social psychology, and psychotherapy. This summary of the current state of the field celebrates the 50th Anniversary of the first major publication in PCT (Powers, Clark & MacFarland, 1960)
This paper is an attempt to understand the content of, and motivation for, a popular form of physicalism, which I call ‘non-reductive physicalism’. Non-reductive physicalism claims although the mind is physical (in some sense), mental properties are nonetheless not identical to (or reducible to) physical properties. This suggests that mental properties are, in earlier terminology, ‘emergent properties’ of physical entities. Yet many non-reductive physicalists have denied this. In what follows, I examine their denial, and I argue that on a plausible understanding of what ‘emergent’ means, the denial is indefensible: non-reductive physicalism is committed to mental properties being emergent properties. It follows that the problems for emergentism—especially the problems of mental causation—are also problems for non-reductive physicalism, and they are problems for the same reason. Like Recommend
The study of consciousness has considerably increased in the last few years. Research has been mainly focused on its neurological aspects, but the intrinsic nature of consciousness is usually completely neglected. In this contribution, we present a new onto‐epistemological general metamodel that we developed to interpret complex partly autonomous systems (like living systems). Our metamodel is not based on the usual space‐time‐energy framework of mainstream Newtonian science, but involves two elemental categories: the domain of objects and the domain of relations. Furthermore, and most importantly, we show that the combination of these two aspects gives rise to the system as a holistic, self‐referential and existential entity. We will then use this onto‐epistemology to interpret the nature of consciousness, which, in this model, is a meta‐physical, meta‐relational self‐referential entity. Collapse
History Following list illustrates the origin and updates from the map.Originated in 1996 by Dr. Eric Schwarz, Neuchâtel, Switzerland. Extended in 1998, including items from the “The Story of Philosophy” by Will Durant (1933). Elaborated in 2000-2001 from many sources for the International Institute for General Systems Studies. Extended in 2016 by Benjamin Hadorn, Fribourg, Switzerland.
Via Örsan Şenalp in The Ecology of Systems Thinking on Facebook
“This article is a translation of a 1966 text by Evald Ilyenkov, Anatoliy Arsen′ev and Vasily Davydov on the science of cybernetics and the belief of many cyberneticians that they can create a “thinking machine” by modelling the human brain. The authors argue against such belief while not denying the benefits of cybernetics. The article examines concepts such as “thinking,” “the machine,” and “the human” from the perspective of Marxist philosophy. The authors criticize the ideological influence of cybernetics on Soviet thought about social organisaiton.”
”opening the box” invites you to delve into the realms of systems thinking, by exploring four layers of ‘systems’: parts and wholes, nascent development, coherence, and metamorphosis. This book is for those who may not believe that they use systems thinking, but already consider relationships and connections in situations, those who wish to learn who are seeking a place to start, or those already practicing systems thinking looking for a different ‘take’ on the discipline. Our story uncovers the power of critical and systemic thinking, as Pandora and her grandmother challenge surface-level solutions, and advocate for deeper exploration. You can learn through their dialogue how we can challenge assumptions, embrace interconnectedness, and harness the power of action, to create positive change.
opening the box: systems thinking for transformative conversations Paperback – 16 Sept. 2024by Jan De Visch (Author), Miguel Pantaleón (Author), Namrata Arora (Author), Tony Korycki (Author)3.5 3.5 out of 5 stars 2 ratingsSee all formats and editions”opening the box” invites you to delve into the realms of systems thinking, by exploring four layers of ‘systems’: parts and wholes, nascent development, coherence, and metamorphosis.This book is for those who may not believe that they use systems thinking, but already consider relationships and connections in situations, those who wish to learn who are seeking a place to start, or those already practicing systems thinking looking for a different ‘take’ on the discipline. Our story uncovers the power of critical and systemic thinking, as Pandora and her grandmother challenge surface-level solutions, and advocate for deeper exploration.You can learn through their dialogue how we can challenge assumptions, embrace interconnectedness, and harness the power of action, to create positive change.
Systems Community of Inquiry 
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