IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2015 - 53

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orber t W iener
was not only one
of the inventors
of cybernetics,
but also an early
cybernetician of
invention (i.e.,
design). Wiener operated between
what is (scientifically describable) and
what ought to be (designed). He also
reflected theoretically on himself doing so, thereby enacting several concepts of today's cybernetic design theory - far ahead of his time.
Today, cybernetic design theory is
among the strongest draws for new
scholars to cybernetics today, which,
in some ways, has become a much
"softer" discipline than it used to be. In
earlier years, cybernetics was primarily associated with control engineering
and advanced mathematics. Norbert
Wiener is widely recognized as an early
cybernetician, and often portrayed as
a representative of the early engineer
mathematician type of cybernetician.
This image, however, is only partially
correct. As a philosopher of science
and technology, Wiener also dealt
with social, ethical and philosophical
aspects of the creative act of invention. In the early 1950s, an editor who
worked with Wiener on his autobiographical writing suggested that Wiener
should write an expository book on the
philosophy of invention.
Wiener accepted and by 1954 he
produced a draft titled Invention: The
Care and Feeding of Ideas, discussing
the circumstances favorable to innovation. Among numerous historical examples of invention the manuscript tells
the story of an inventor whose improvement of submarine telephone cables
was appropriated by AT&T without due
recognition and without appropriate
compensation [1, pp. 67-76]. Wiener,
who had previously seen his own patented work bought by the Bell Telephone Company only to prevent others
from using it, developed great interest

in this story. He wrote an outline for a
film based on it, which he unsuccessfully tried to get Orson Welles to produce [1, pp. x-xiii]. Proceeding to turn it
into a novel [2], Wiener lost his interest
in and abandoned work on the book
on invention. The manuscript was published in 1993, nearly 40 years after it
had been written and nearly 30 years
after Wiener's death [1].
In the early 1950s, the word design
did not yet denote an academic discipline, nor was it understood as a process as widely as it is today. The word
invention, especially when approached
as a topic that demands philosophical
treatment, may have been the most
obvious term to use at the time to
describe novelty generation as an area
of intellectual work. Today, the meanings invoked by Wiener's use of the
term invention might be better encompassed by the word design. Wiener
thus helped forge cybernetics, which
eventually resulted in a theory of novelty generation, i.e., design. While neither
design as an academic discipline nor a
coherent body of design theory existed
at the time, Wiener already set out to
produce a philosophical treatment of
novelty generation, i.e., invention.
This article traces in Wiener's work
some concepts of what would eventually emerge as cybernetic design
theory. Based on a limited review of
his extensive body of writings, this
analysis is not complete. Moreover,
this analysis speculates on aspects of
Wiener's doing, thinking, and ethics,
which, for reasons discussed below,
cannot be expected to be reflected in
full in his written legacy. Nonetheless,
even this incomplete review indicates
that Wiener's contribution to contemporary cybernetic design theory is
greater than many might expect.

Cybernetics and Design Theory
Both cybernetics and design are relatively young academic disciplines. The
publication of Wiener's Cybernetics

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2015.2461172
Date of publication: 16 September 2015

september 2015

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