The cybernetics of design
A brief introduction to Applied Cybernetics in UX
Behind the popularity of ‘Design Thinking’ and ‘Systems Thinking’ there are rigourous academic sciences. Way back in the origin story of Design Thinking, there is Design Science. Likewise, Systems Thinking is a popularised, but highly scaled-down version, of Systems Science.
Design thinking is a way for people to solve problems by thinking like designers. Systems thinking is a way for people to solve problems by thinking like systems experts. Both of these methods are good for reducing complex processes into routine sequences of activity. In other words, as is the case with Design Thinking, it’s a way for non-designers to adopt the problem-solving method of a designer. The assumption being that, none of the rest of those Sciences is necessary to be effective other than the ‘process’ itself.
As methods of ‘thinking’, their strength is in how they reduce complex processes into routine sequences of activity. But at the same time, they neglect much of the substance of those fields, in acceptance of that generalised framework of ‘how’ to think. Much is missing. To paraphrase a famous Cybernetician, Gordan Pask, ‘all products are a result of a process, and all processes result in a product’. In which case, the ‘how’ defines the ‘what’. And both are determined by ‘why’.
And ‘why’ is often the missing piece in applying either forms of thinking in commercial contexts. Terms like ‘value’ and ‘purpose’ are used regularly, but rarely with consistency, and even rarer with reference to the many nuances that come to be when applied in different contexts.
What’s missing is the overarching system model of the commercial context, the user context and the product delivery context, and how they form parts of one system. But recognising this cannot come from simply ‘thinking’ or any cognitive perspective, but from a body of knowledge called ‘Cybernetics’. And here I’ll explain why.
Design Science + Systems Science
Alone, these fields are potent and capable of telling us a lot about the world around us. Systems Science investigates the wider environment, from Ecology to Society, and how the interaction between individuals, and with culture defines both the individual and the environment. Design Science offers us the ability to intervene in both environment and behaviour, to understand what aspects of change might be needed in order to create different systems, and behaviours. As a bonus, Behaviour Science explains how individuals behave, what they do, and perhaps help explain why. So these three fields, taken in combination, are somewhat of a holy trinity for designing the world for the betterment of everyone.
But let’s leave Behaviour Science out of this picture, and firstly focus on the relationship between Systems and Design Sciences.
Amongst designers, there have been many calls to ‘see our work through a systems thinking lens’. At the same time, there have also been numerous critiques, with designers recognising how designers are not currently equipped to solve tomorrow’s problems, as well as why, without Systems Science, Design Thinking doesn’t always address the right root-causes. One of the primary reasons to make this call is how we fixate on the false boundaries of a given problem, perhaps to the point of distraction.
To solve a problem, we must often look beyond the place where the problem occurs. Like when the chiropractor understands biomechanics enough to know that the pain-point is actually a nexus from a number of conflicting or competing pressures elsewhere in the body. Or how Russell Ackoff, an important Systems Scientist, described how we put pain-killers into the stomach, not the site of pain, because we understand how the bodily system works.
Hernandez (2021) also makes use of Ackoff’s example, wherein a problem is solved at the systems level. To solve the problem of re-engaging fishermen to fish, the dependency was a sense of community. The dissolution of the problem was to create a new nexus — a football club. In the example, the designers effectively ‘dissolved’ the problem, by changing the circumstances rather than the behaviours of the people.
As a complex adaptive system, a human being naturally seeks inertia in their behaviour. Interia is what we call ‘habit’. Behaviour change is generally very difficult, unless the circumstances are changed. As Winston Churchill (London, 28 October 1943) once said, ‘We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us’, or to rephrase in this context — first we shape our digital experiences, and afterwards our digital experiences shape us. Often with unintended consequences.
Whilst most people have heard of the more popular ‘Systems Thinking’, it’s often not recognised how Systems Thinking is only one aspect of Systems Science. And there are different forms of Systems Thinking too. There’s also Systems Dynamics and Cybernetics, the core of which are likely more valuable and applicable to origination and maturation of products than Systems Thinking.
Even so, calls for using Systems Thinking with Design are getting louder. At times, it seems like everyone is talking about it. John Maeda posted recently on LinkedIn about Systems Thinking in Design, and more recently sharing a 1989 work by the Cybernetician Klaus Krippendorff. There’s a Systemic Design Association advocating for it. There’s a general rise (Google Trends Worldwide, 2004–2022) in relationship between Design Thinking & Systems Thinking, with a sharper incline happening from 2012 onwards.
Across 4 of the most popular publications specialising in UX since 2017, there are a total of 157 articles discussing ‘systems thinking’. But there’s a big difference between some of the terms being used— Systemic Design¹, Systems Thinking, Systems Science — and the concept of combining the Design and Systems in each of these instances is very different, and have very different outcomes. And a term like ‘Design Systems’ often muddies the role of Systems too.
With all the discussion about it, you’d be inclined to think that it’s already embedded in commercial design practices. But on this front, it’s worth looking a little closer.
The majority of the methodologies taught in bootcamps and modern UX training provide the tools with which to understand the systems we seek to affect, but very few make reference to a stable model of how customers behave, and/or how to make use of it in DesignOps. Having reviewed curricula for modern UX teaching (across Bootcamps, and University courses), it seems to me that a cybernetic understanding of customers, and the operational systems we create teams to design for them, is currently missing.
But not completely missing. Alan Cooper’s Goal-directed Design, and a few others (Dubberly, Pangaro, Krippendorff (Oct 2007) HCD and Cybernetics, Ranulph Glanville, etc), provide some guidence, and yet Cybernetics as a tool for UX Design seems to have largely been overlooked in the mainstream, and in education.
Without Cybernetics, Designers often lack the vocabulary from their own discipline, quite often falling back on narrow definitions that don’t apply to the core problems, the root causes, or the first-principles. It seems that perhaps we don’t have an effective model to explain how to operate within complex environments, and within complex problem spaces.
Leveraging Cybernetics is an intentional step toward dissolving problem spaces.
Leveraging Cybernetics
When I explain how one of the biggest influences in my UX career is Cybernetics, people ask how many robots I’ve built. Unfortunately, the answer is ‘none’. The term has become so closely associated with robots that it’s rarely considered as a highly valuable subject that holds the potential of solving some of the biggest problems we face today. When most people think of Cybernetics, they think of technology, like robotics². The reality is slightly more generalised than this narrow application.
In fact, the influence of Cybernetics is everywhere if you look for it. It’s one of those unseen influences in so many fields, from sociology, ethnography, quantum physics, computer science, psychology, architecture. So many Cyberneticians have dropped in, applied some Cybernetic ideas, and changed the field forever — but we’ll leave those stories for a future article. For now, let’s take a look at how this science started out.
The Origins of Cybernetics
When people talk about ‘unseen influences’, they’re usually talking about some conspiracy theory, or the illuminati. But when I say that Cybernetics is an unseen influence, it’s because it’s a fact. It’s not really too much of an exaggeration to say that the world-view of Cybernetics created the modern world. Both in good ways — and some undesirable ways too.
Cybernetics’ origin story is quite ancient, being the study of systems and processes. Plato even used the term in Gorgias. But the official start date for Cybernetics was relatively recent.
In 1948, a polymath mathematician called Norbert Wiener, published a book that introduced the subject to the world. The book was a result of years of work, and captured the context of when he was tasked to solve some of the most important problems facing the Allies during World War II. To solve them, Wiener gathered a crack team of experts, each one the highest exemplar of their field. And they were a very diverse group: Engineers, Psychologists, Biologists, Physicists, mathematicians etc. But after the challenges had been stated, the problems laid on the table, an even bigger challenge emerged. The vocabulary each one used was peculiar and idiosyncratic from each of the others. This was one of the first times that interdisciplinary work was happening, and it was a struggle³.
Although each expert had a great deal of clarity with their own field, when it came to communicating between them, the semblance of within-discipline clarity dissolved. The team struggled because they didn’t have a unified set of ideas that worked across all the fields of thought. It was a superb example of the Parable of the Elephant. As always, Aristotle provides one of the earliest, and finely worded, examples of the effect:
“…no one is able to attain the truth adequately, while on the other hand, we do not collectively fail, but every one says something true about the nature of things, and while we individually contribute little or nothing to the truth, by the union of all a considerable amount is amassed” (Metaphysics, Bk2:1,993b).
And this is exactly what Cybernetics set out to do.
The science of Cybernetics
Cybernetics is a specific form of Systems Science. It’s also often categorised as a Complexity Science⁴. The name actually means ‘steersman’, reminiscent of the governor of a ship (a Latinised form of the Greek word, Kybernetes), and the quality of ‘steersmanship’. With this word, the concept should actually be associated with control, determining which course it takes, and how. It’s conceptually more closely related to the term ‘Strategy’, although they differ in their context. The context for the term Strategy was the battlefield⁴. The context for the term Cybernetics is the ocean. The former saw people pitted against other people; The latter, where people are pitted against the unknown.
People have always been pitted against the unknown, against uncertainty. Albeit the uncertainty of events, of security of the next meal. The universe is a very uncertain and sometimes hostile place, especially for Life: so much so, Hobbes would have us believe that as a result, life is ‘nasty brutish, and short’, and theorised that in order to flourish, we must first protect and secure ourselves from that uncertainty⁵.
All problems, whether they are regarded as problems of recognition, or classification, or indeed decision, are problems about uncertainty. (Stafford Beer, Cybernetician)
But there are other forms of Uncertainty. Physicists have a good understanding of the types of uncertainty of this thing called ‘the universe’ that we inhabit. Quantum physics tells us that the universe naturally progresses towards disorder, and chaos (for which they use the fancy term, ‘entropy’). Interestingly, Cybernetics frames itself as the study of both ‘entropy’ (unstructured, disorder, instability, unconstrained) and its opposite: ‘negentropy’ (structured, per Schrödinger, 1943) by focussing on complexity. Humans like to counteract entropy by enforcing order, stability, constraint, structure, hierarchy, and much more besides. In which case, humans are agents of negentropy, as a means of producing security from uncertainty.
But needless to say, and expanding this out to the big-picture for a moment, the understanding of the supreme system, an engine called ‘the universe’, is a complex matter indeed. And humans exist within it, they form part of that engine. Our lives are tethered to this engine, as the ancient Greek philosopher Zeno stated, like a dog hitched to a cart⁶. The engine acts, interacts, reacts as it always has done, in an epic machinery of Godly proportions. That ancient and eternal movement is what Daoists refer to as ‘The Way’⁷. When seen from a Cybernetics lens, the universe is one big engine - and there’s so much beauty and complexity within it.
Some pragmatic tools to understand, study and affect that engine are found in Systems Sciences. And although you’ve heard of ‘Systems Thinking’⁸, and perhaps ‘System Dynamics’, it’s less likely you have heard of ‘Cybernetics’. Each of these fields has value to Design, but Cybernetics is the most latent of them, and I will explain how the two can work together.
Cybernetic Blueprints for Design
Design and Cybernetics are deeply connected with each other. In my view, they’re actually one and the same.
One of the most useful definitions of Cybernetics is Couffignal’s description of it being ‘the art of ensuring the efficacy of action’⁹. Hence, the steersman. But the steersman can take many forms, as the user, or customer, as the designer, as the team, as the product. These spheres all make use of the common framework defined in Cybernetics.
But there’s further correlation between Design and Cybernetics. As the Cybernetician, Ross Ashby once observed,
“…cybernetics typically treats any given…machine by asking not ‘what individual act will it provide here and now?’ But ‘what are all the possible behaviours it can produce?’” (Ashby pp3).
Now read the previous sentence again and switch out ‘machine’, for ‘system’, ‘product’, ‘experience’, ‘customer’. As Designers, don’t we do the same? Not just observing a given product or experience, but also recognise the possible, and the distance between that possible with the ‘actual’ in front of us? In a creative field, a great understanding of the actual, the specific, the end product is part of the life-blood of a Designer. The act of reflective thought, and deconstruction is what it means to be a Designer. It’s what makes great designers, those who question the choices, and see not just the path taken, but the paths not taken. And truly great designers seek to understand why. Cybernetics provides a conceptual framework for ‘why’.
As the scientist Karl Popper once said, ‘definition is the greatest form of exclusion’ — because when you say a thing is this, you’re also saying the reverse — what it is not. And Design does that. Every choice we make whether visible or invisible, tangible or intangible, is ‘design’. Design, as they say, really is ‘decision-making’.
Ashby offered a further description of Cybernetics that feels like a description of Design too:
“Cybernetics envisages a set of possibilities much wider than the actual, and then asks why the particular case should conform to its usual particular restriction” (ibid).
In effect, Cybernetics is the study of how and why things are as they are. Design is a conscious or unconscious act of determining properties of any given thing, and therefore a Designer is often the reason for how and why things are as they are. Cybernetics provides a language and a framework to do that. Therefore Design, like Cybernetics, “…the science of effective organisation” (Couffignal, pp13). Not organisation in the narrow sense of people, groups, and companies, but organisation of the structural properties that define anything. Like the idea of ‘building the right thing’ and ‘building the thing right’, as a compliment to the Double-Diamond.
Simply explained, Cybernetics is a science of feedback. How the influence of one thing changes another, and how things are refined because of the processes acting upon them. When you investigate customers using research, that’s feedback. When you’re sharing an idea, or a prototype for internal stakeholders to shape the product, that’s feedback. When the team critiques the work against the objective, that’s feedback. Feedback loops are so embedded into the process of being a designer, that perhaps we tend to take them for granted.
Whilst Systems Thinking pushes to broaden the traditional scopes of where we apply our work, and the spheres of influence, Cybernetics focusses distinctly on the feedback that takes place inside (between the parts of a System), and outside (between Systems).
Take for example a few terms and concepts from Cybernetics, and see how they explain, the practice of Design¹¹ (A full Glossary of Cybernetics concepts for Designers, is available on my website):
Assembly — A part of the real world selected for observation. Every human field of endeavour might rightly be considered an ‘assembly’. Take for example, the study of biology, physics, chemistry, business, or design, which are all abstracted from absolute reality. The absolute system is the Universe, and in order to study any part of it, humans tend to abstract it into pieces called an ‘assembly’. In design, we call defining this boundary ‘the framing’.
Artefact — Devices constructed to simulate some aspect of behaviour. When we describe the use of ‘Design Artefacts’, we are also creating a device to ‘stimulate’ some aspect of behaviour of our customers.
Behaviour — An patterned, or unchanging, form of events due to the activity within the Assembly. When we talk about customer behaviours, we are talking about the variety within the pattern of behaviour. Such a definition transcends Behavioural Science, to include any actions by any System.
Complexity — The total variety possible within a given System or Assembly.
System — a set of interrelated elements. An entity composed of at least 2 elements, and a relationship which holds those elements together. There are 5 types of System, per definitions by Cyberneticians over the last 100 years (Open/Closed, Abstract/Concrete, Simple/Complex, Static/Dynamic, Positive/Negative), which might all be considered lenses from which to view any System.
State — A condition of an object, entity or element, consisting of particular properties at a given time. The state of a person could be their health, position, attitude, financial situation, number of romantic attachments, etc. There are a range and hierarchy of properties that define a state. For this reason, we can define 4 types of States (Current vs Goal, and Ideal vs Perceived).
Space — A proxy notion to explain the variety within an Assembly. The breath, depth and width of a given ‘Space’, is defined by the variety and complexity within it, as well as the scope of the boundary. There are 4 types of Spaces: Problem-Solution Space, Knowledge and Phase Spaces. (see also, ‘Boundary’).
Variety — The number of potential States of a System. The higher the number, the greater the complexity of the System. Activity by humans tends to adjust variety in 2 directions (amplifying/increasing, or attenuating/reducing). The double-diamond represents divergence (generative) and convergence (selective), which are tthe same as amplifying or attenuating information.
Do any of these concepts feel familiar? One of the challenges of Design, is to better define the activities we perform and how they contribute to outcomes. Treating a business, team, individual as a System of varying scales of complexity offers us the perspective we need to better control it.
In many cases, we already do it, but Cybernetics can offer assistive vocabulary and concepts to help us take a step beyond.
A step beyond
So Cybernetics can help Designers to conceptualise their work, their process to do that work, and it can also be used as a model for designing oneself, one’s career, one’s team or one’s business. Even one’s life.
Each speculative experiment that provides alternative futures, and when we ask: which version should exist? Which would be most successful? This is a Cybernetic act, it’s Applied Cybernetics. To rephrase what Ashby stated earlier, the designer begins by asking not ‘what actual thing exists here and now?’ But ‘what are all the possible things that could have existed? Why this thing, and how does it best fit the needs — the purpose — of it’s existence?
Finally, although there are many definitions of what Cybernetics means¹², there is a means to apply it to the activity of Design and Innovation. Applying Cybernetics provides a more detailed and holistic picture of the entire Product Value System (wherein ‘Value’ is provided to customers). I’ll reserve some more detailed concepts for future articles, since my aim with this article is to spark your curiosity, as a call-to-action to find further connections between Cybernetics and Design, and your own practice — to step beyond what’s currently discussed, into new spaces and innovative work.
Cybernetics has been an incredibly pervasive mental model. From the way we think about Design, to how we apply it in practice; to how we think about customers, users, people, and their needs; Or how we define processes and DesignOps to facilitate our best work; how to design great Designers, how to mentor people through finding their own skills and talents, and how to best contribute within teams and organisations — the recurring theme is always ‘Cybernetics’. The same principles may be applied to any domain of knowledge: there’s the ‘Cybernetics of Team Design’, the ‘Cybernetics of Product Design’, the ‘Cybernetics of Career Design’, the ‘Cybernetics of DesignOps’. All of these things are applying the same core principles to every element of the process, albeit People, Processes, Products or Problems.
If you’re working on (or just interested in) any of these topics, please reach out! Connect with me on LinkedIn, Academia, Twitter, or Medium.
References
[1]: Definition: “Systemic design is distinguished from service or experience design in terms of scale, social complexity and integration — it is concerned with higher-order systems that entail multiple subsystems (that might be defined services).” As defined by Systemic Design Association, accessed 29 Oct ‘22. There are many other proposed upgrades to Human-Centred Design. For example, Humanity-centred Design (Norman, 2022), Life-centred Design (Fjord, 2020; Lutz, 2020), Bee-centred Design (Weaver, 2019).
[2]: It’s not surprising given the ubiquity of the prefix Cyber- to most futuristic technologies. Modern technologies associated with the internet — Cybercrime, Cybersecurity, Cybercafe (in the 90s), popular culture — Cybertron (Transformers), Cyborgs (such as Cyborg from DC comics), Cyberdyne Systems (Terminator), Cybermen (Dr Who), etc have cemented in the mainstream consciousness the idea of anything Cyber- being the science of robotics. To an extent, the prefix has misappropriated what Cybernetics actually is.
[3]: As Wiener elaborated: He, along with his colleague Dr Rosenbleuth, “…shared the conviction that the most fruitful areas for growth of the sciences were those which had been neglected as a no-man’s land between various established fields…” They observed how regretfully, “…science has been increasingly the task of specialists, in fields that show a tendency to grow progressively narrower.” Wiener lamented how a scientist was often “…filled with the jargon of his field, and will know all its literature and all its ramifications, but, more frequently than not, he will regard the next subject as something belonging to his colleague three doors down the corridor, and will consider any interest in it on his own part as an unwarranted breach of privacy” (Wiener 1948, pp.2).
[4]: There are various terms applied, each confusing and reusing concepts across the fields of Systems Sciences.
[5]: Strategy stems from the Greek word “Strategos” meaning “General”, or “Director”. Likewise, Tactic stems from the Greek word “taktike” meaning “to arrange for war”, as we can see all the abovementioned terms find their origin from warfare, to refer to the office of the general, the arrangement and the actual waging of war
[6]: Adam Smith, for example, the father of Economics, once believed that people were inherently self-interested because of this reason, but once these needs were met, the natural progression is benevolence. The physical needs for protection, and physiological needs because of survival are of course at the basis of Maslow’s hierarchy, and difficult to dispute for that reason.
[7]: “When a dog is tied to a cart, if it wants to follow, it is pulled and follows, making its spontaneous act coincide with necessity. But if the dog does not follow, it will be compelled in any case. So it is with men too: even if they don’t want to, they will be compelled to follow what is destined. ― Zeno of Citium”
[8]: For example, Aristotle described how “..all this world of nature is in movement” (Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book 4:5). He was referencing Change as the only constant. The universe is in perpetual motion, in an infinite state of flux. On the other side of the world, Lao Tzu provided the ultimate guide to navigating that state of flux, which he named ‘Dao’ (The Way, Flow, Path). The grand ultimate way of the universe was defined in proto-scientific terms, in which the universe divides, proliferates and expands, generating maximum variety at all times. This maximum variety is then observable from the absolute extremes of that variety, which was later visualised in the form of the Tai-kik/chi (commonly known in the West as ‘Yin-Yang’).
[9]: ‘Second-Order Cybernetics’, or ‘Systems Thinking’, assumes there’s a thinker observing systems. Inevitably, the observer is also part of the System it observes. Systems Thinking provides some structure for how to think, how to recognise oneself as part of a bigger system, and how behaviours between humans create societal systems. Overcoming biases of our own personal input-output, and our own thinking as a ‘muddy box’ effect.
[10]: Couffignal, Louis, “Essai d’une définition générale de la cybernétique”, The First International Congress on Cybernetics, Namur, Belgium, June 26–29, 1956, Gauthier-Villars, Paris, 1958, pp. 46–54.
[11]: Sources are collected across a range of Cybernetic sources, but principally quoted or paraphrased are: Primary Source(s): Beer (Brain of the Firm 1981, pp.401–403; Heart of the Enterprise 1979); Pask (An Approach to Cybernetics 1968, pp. 114–116); Bertalanffy (General System Theory, 1978);
[12]: The scope of those definitions almost always fall into problematic territories when applied more generally.
Further reading
Acutt, Jamie (2022). A unified Glossary of UX Systemics Terminology
Ackoff, Russell L. (1971). Towards a System of Systems Concepts. In: Management Science (Vol. 117, №11, July 1971), University of Pennsylvania.
Ackoff, Russell L. (1974). Redesigning The Future: A Systems Approach To Societal Problems. Wiley, pp. 237–240.
Beer, Stafford (1979). The Heart of the Enterprise.
Beer, Stafford (1981). Brain of the Firm.
Bosschaert, T. (2020). Systemic Design. Systems Innovation.
Buchanan, R., (2019). Systems Thinking and Design Thinking: The Search for Principles in the World We Are Making. In: She Ji: The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation, 5(2), pp. 85–104.
Cherry, Colin (1957). On Human Communication, Technology Press and John Wiley.
Hugh Dubberly and Paul Pangaro (2019). Cybernetics and Design: Conversations for Action, in: Design Cybernetics: Navigating the New
Thomas Fisher and Christiane M. Herr, Editors, Springer.
Jackson, M. C. (2003). Systems Thinking: Creative Holism for Managers. John Wiley & Sons.
Jones, P. (2015). Design Research Methods for Systemic Design: Perspectives from Design Education and Practice. In: Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the ISSS — 2014 United States, 1(1). Available at: https://journals.isss.org/index.php/proceedings58th/article/view/ 2353
Jones, P., (2014). Systemic Design Principles for Complex Social Systems. In: Translational Systems Sciences, 1, pp.91–128.
Jones, P.H., & van Patter, G.K. (2009). Design 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0: The rise of visual sensemaking. New York: NextDesign Leadership Institute.
Krippendorff, K. (2007). The Cybernetics of Design and the Design of Cybernetics. Kybernetes, 36 (9/10), 1381–1392. https://doi.org/10.1108/03684920710827364
Meadows, Donella, (2009). Thinking In Systems. 1st ed. London: Earthscan.
Pask, Gordon (1968); An Approach to Cybernetics, Hutchison & Co/Radius Books edition, London.
Popper, Karl (1959). The Logic of Scientific Discovery. Routledge.
Richmond, B (1994). Systems thinking/system dynamics: Let’s just get on with it. System Dynamics Review, 10(2–3), pp.135–157.
Senge, Peter, (1990). The Fifth Discipline. 1st ed. Doubleday.
Wiener, Norbert (1948). Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. Cambridge, MA, USA: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press
