IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2015 - 54

[4], and the Macy Conferences [3] between 1946 and
1953 are often cited as commencement events of the
cybernetics discipline, while the origins of design as
an academic research discipline are commonly traced
back [5] to early meetings addressing design methods,
as well as Simon's publication of Sciences of the Artificial [6], 15 years after Wiener wrote his manuscript
on invention. The establishment of cybernetics as a
discipline is commonly linked to technical challenges
that arose during World War II, such as automatic artillery and missile guidance. The design research field,
likewise, has been described as arising from World War
II and the need to approach problems of warfare "scientifically" [5, p. 1].
The need for research in these areas did not end
with the war. It continued following the Sputnik Shock
[7, pp. 225-232] and under the conditions of the
Cold War, expanding into operations and management
research, as well as into creativity studies and innovation-oriented education [5]. During their development,
the two fields influenced one another with design
thinkers borrowing from cybernetics and systems

The establishment of cybernetics
as a discipline is commonly linked
to technical challenges that arose
during World War II.

theory, and with cyberneticians eventually recognizing
design as a metaphor for human epistemizing, and
adopting design as a central cybernetic theme. Central
notions of Ashby's Introduction to Cybernetics [8] for
example - in particular those of variety, goal orientation, and systemic constraints - feature prominently in
Rittel's design theory [9]. Cybernetics became a particularly rich resource for design thinkers like Rittel once
the early cybernetic interest in strict goal orientation
was extended to also accommodate processes with
changing goals. The Biological Computer Laboratory at
the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, led by von Foerster, was a hotspot of cybernetic research beginning in
1958. The lab was closed down in 1974, when regulations for Department of Defense basic research funding
required "direct and apparent relationship to a specific
military function or operation," which von Foerster was
not prepared to offer [10].

Working at the Architectural Association in London
and later at the Biological Computer Lab, Pask formulated Conversation Theory [11], a cybernetic theory of
epistemological activities such as learning and designing, grounded in circular feedback. With his "non-trivial
machine" von Foerster [12, pp. 305-323] proposed an
input-output model with a circular effect on the state
of its own internal transformational rule, showing that
circular causality can lead to indeterminism in a rationally describable system. Proposing the notion of formally undecidable questions [12, pp. 287-304], somewhat
analogous to Rittel and Webber's notion of wicked problems [13], von Foerster argued that only we can decide
such questions, thereby framing second-order cybernetics as an ethical position. In doing so von Foerster [12,
pp. 287ff.] distinguished between morals (the regulation
of others, from the outside) and ethics (the regulation
of oneself, from within). Von Foerster, Pask and others
made explicit an approach to cybernetics to which cybernetics itself was a self-referential subject. This so-called
second-order cybernetics became explicit in the late
1960s when Mead challenged the American Society for
Cybernetics to apply cybernetics to its own organization
[14, pp. 1-11], as well as in a self-referential cybernetic
epistemology of the following decades (see [12]).
Second-order self-reference is applied to design by
Krippendorff, a student of Rittel, who points out that
designing for others requires an understanding of others' understandings [15, p. 7]. Glanville, a student of
Pask, developed a Theory of Objects [16], which is
based on circular interaction between observers, i.e.,
a self and one or more others, who can be imagined.
Such interactions form the basis of Glanville's view of
design, in which engagements can be "out of control" as
opposed to fulfilling the Law of Requisite Variety. In this
way, circular interaction generates new variety, taking
designers (figuratively speaking) to new places rather
than confining them to known places: "Betweenness is
the source of interaction and is also its mode and its
site" [17, p. 4]. In this view, error, noise and misunderstanding have value because "The imprecision we experience [..] may lead to [..] novelty" [18, p. 449].
Studying with Pask, Glanville developed a notion
that responded to the paradox that any universe should
contain everything that it needs to contain, yet must be
seen from outside if this is to be appreciated - analogously to Gödel's incompleteness theorem [19] and to
the paradox Russell found in Frege's set theory [20,
pp. 45-49]. A universe's property "contains everything
it should," necessarily, can only be recognized from
its outside. Yet, being a property of that universe, it
belongs within that universe. Glanville proposed that
"the boundaries of universes should be seen as having
metaphorical hands on them, constantly grabbing that

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