In the reading, The Disregarded Tools of Modern Man by Stafford Beer, he stated something that stood out to me. “…we are using them on the wrong side of the variety equation. We use them without regard to the proliferation of variety within the system, thereby effectively increasing it, and not, as they should be used, to amplify regulative variety.” We as a society has not only advanced our technology but we have successfully forgotten the main purpose of majority of the technology’s components. We feel that with the use of the computers, we are making the systems and everything we do more efficiently, but in reality, they are dragging us down.

As Beer states in his lecture, the computer we have are supposed to be used to “amplify regulative variety”, we can somehow use the computers to develop systems, systems that can somehow operate like our bodies do. They can operate, react, and interact. “Man is immersed in a world which he perceives through his sense organs” as Norbert Wiener justly points out in The Human Use of Human Beings. Wiener emphasizes how man and machine communicate through means of messages and other communications methods. He uses a kitten as an example, and exhibits how humans and animals alike receive messages by our sensory organs, and as a result, registers an action. It is important that machines can send and receive messages similarly to how humans do as well. Here, he uses an elevator as an example to show how a machine understands the basics of its performance and feedback. Because it understands senses what it is suppose to do, people are able to step in and out of the elevator and use it for its main intention.

Gordon Pask expresses in The Architectural Relevance of Cybernetics, how architecture and cybernetics go hand in hand and accentuates the fact that architects are first system designers that have later been forced to take an interest in organizational systems and etc. With the help of architecture and cybernetics, we as designers can some what carry out what Beer, Weiner and Pask are concerned about. We are given advanced technology and programs that potentially aid our designs, which in the long run “act as intelligent extensions of the tool-like program…”. Much like many of the systems that our society is woven and emerged into, architectural designs should as well, have rules for evolution built into them. With the help and correct usage of cybernetics, we can achieve this.