The paper “Cybernetics and Design: Conversations for Action” [PDF] has recently gone to print in a peer-reviewed journal. It offers a rationale for the position that design is conversation; perhaps a surprising idea, but the logic in the paper is rigorous. Cybernetics offers a foundation for 21st-century design practice, here is the core of it:
What Will 21st-Century Designers Do?
Given vast changes in society and technology in the past 50 years, what will designers do differently today?
How cybernetics connects computing, counterculture, and design
Quite a mouthful, that title, but it’s an excellent summary: The connections across those domains are so rich and with so many shared influences, it becomes clear that the history of interaction design—and also its future—is bound up in systems and cybernetics, cultural politics and personalities.
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Designing for the Models in our Heads
When we understand something—let’s say a concept, like a table—we have some formulation of that “in our head”. That formulation is something we can manipulate while we’re thinking or conversing or acting.