Biological Computer Laboratory — The past of Cybernetics to the present of Design to the Uncertain Future
The History of the BCL+ Heinz von Foerster
“The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s Biological Computer Laboratory (BCL) was a major second order cybernetics lab. To its founder, Heinz von Foerster, second-order cybernetics constitutes a “cybernetics of cybernetics,” one necessary to see how observers set out their own purpose in their observation of systems and approach questions of social responsibility critically”
“second order cybernetics considers how one as an observer impacts as system, and how perception (both biologically and subjectively) factors into how one understands a system”
“Rather than further the modernist project of gathering knowledge and applying it to control nature, biological computing does not seek to “understand” nature, but rather to experiment with inputs and outputs, acknowledging the very impossibility of knowing nature.”
“The lab often had to contend with grand visions of artificial intelligence in similar lab spaces that were incongruous with BCL designs and philosophies.”
First-order cybernetics was the cybernetics used by those looking for control. It was driven by the need to control systems through feedback loops. Second-order cybernetics was the cybernetics of cybernetics used to understand control. Second-order cybernetics thought about how one can understand self-adaptive complex systems that were high in complexity and control themselves.
A First-order cybernetics system would be one that’s engineered for a designer or engineer to control while a Second-order cybernetics system can only humble those who try to design for it’s complexity.
Technological Innovations at the BCL
“Babcock designed the Adaptive Reorganizing Automaton as “a continuous and potentially recurrent network that would ‘evolve’ certain patterns of behavior due to its specific topology, environmental input conditions, and the system’s own input history.””
Self-Organizing Systems*
This is is just one example of a invention that came out of the BCL, but possibly the most interesting in our discussion of the BCL. Many of these technologies came at the synthesis of various disciplines coming together. Today with the advent of 3D printing and digital fabrication and design, synthetic biology, and the intelligent internet at large this same type of idea of converging academic disciplines possible.
Alternative and demilitarized Design
This is in stark contrast with contemporary search engine design. Albert Mueller writes that in the BCL’s work in this capacity, “one is reminded of advanced, non-commercial conceptions of what was to become the Internet.” He deems it promising work within information design addressing problems that have yet to be solved and might have had the BCL been funded further.
In returning to the grand nature of the BCL’s vision with this particular computer network, however, Weston mentions by the end of an interview conducted by Jan Mueggenburg and Jamie Hutchinson and was published in an Austrian journal, “When you really think about it, a lot of the things you can do with things like Google are coming remarkably close to what we had in mind.” This nicely sums up the scope and the precocious nature of the BCL’s work, and rightfully historicizes the ambitions of a project like Google as being thought out before in less recognized places in innovation histories like Champaign-Urbana.
Social Innovations: Educational Reform and Activism
Cybernetics of Cybernetics
“Students took responsibility of their own pages to illustrate different concepts pertinent to second-order cybernetics, and these pages weaved through reprints of selected publications from scholars in the field”.
“But more broadly, the book has a keen interest in the need to think more ecologically toward engineering, particularly considering the context of industrialization at the time, and how to effect environmental change through activist work. Unsurprisingly, as was the case with The Whole University Catalog, von Foerster’s course directory indicates that students came from a span of different majors, and many expressed concerns over the environmental impact of industrialization.”
https://publish.illinois.edu/prairiefutures/uiuc-historical-resources/
A picture from the Whole University Catalog:
Design through 2nd-Order Cybernetics
This brings us to the importance of Cybernetics today for Design. One of Norbert Weiner’s, the person who coined Cybernetics in 1948, principles was that to affect systems we needed information and feedback. This is what drove computing and design, and it can be found as a direct link to what we have today in google, the internet, and design thinking. First order cybernetics worked in that it was able to take control of the systems we had in place in the past, but this way of thinking and designing won’t work anymore due to the “wicked problems” we have today. Anthropologist Margaret Mead came in with the concept later of Cybernetics of Cybernetics, which in a way became the main driver of Human centered Design.
“If design, then systems: Due in part to the rise of computing technology and its role in human communications, the domain of design has expanded from giving form to creating systems that support human interactions; thus, systems literacy becomes a necessary foundation for design.
If systems, then cybernetics: Interaction involves goals, feedback, and learning, the science of which is cybernetics.
If cybernetics, then second-order cybernetics: Framing wicked problems requires explicit values and viewpoints, accompanied by the responsibility to justify them with explicit arguments, thus incorporating subjectivity and the epistemology of second-order cybernetics.
If second-order cybernetics, then conversation: Design grounded in argumentation requires conversation so that participants may understand, agree, and collaborate on effective action.” — Dubberly and Pangaro
Renowned designer Kenya Hara writes in his book Designing Design : “Creativity is to discover a question that has never been asked”. Rather than dictating queries to machines, how can we harness these principles of second-order cybernetics, of design as argumentation and conversation, to enable machines and their interfaces to provoke questions for us to answer? Questions that may seem unrelated and strange but actually serve to reveal new connections, new insights, and new ‘answers’. Questions that can help us understand and take responsibility for our roles in the design of our future, and therefore help us to ask better questions of the machines in our present.
