From this article, it is clear that Stafford Beer is quite the character.  His opinion of contemporary economics has considerable breadth; Alongside his definition of ‘variety’ which he does an excellent job of driving home, Beer has a fundamentally different approach to understanding cybernetics.  He uses the example of the personal computer, or any computer per se, to qualify cybernetics as “the techniques of the science of effective organization”.  I found this example to be the most relevant to any discussion of his work, as he uses it to describe how such a tool can be used to make incredibly important successful decisions, but also incredibly successful decisions incorrectly.  Again, to touch on variety and it’s application to cybernetics, Beer unearths the term requisite variety and explains how the term can contribute back to a regulatory constraint.  With the adjustment of such constraints, we can see that the output of such equations are affected, leading to a dramatic shift in decision making.

The article by Pask was certainly an interesting one linking the concept of cybernetics to an architectural domain as well as basic structural ways of thinking.  This process of relating an architectural typology to environmental systems evokes a thought well beyond the simple cybernetic concept, and pushes it into a realm of technical and aesthetic discussion.  Pask puts the task of relating contemporary architecture to it’s immediate environment, onto the shoulders of the modern designer by challenging the conventional logic of evolution in design and construction.  His relation to Gaudi, and the artistic period of surrealism pushes the convention of architectural design and it’s relation to cybernetics into a concord of ‘supernormal’ stimuli, where exists an environmental dialogue between man and machine.  This dialogue contests the notion furthermore by introducing the idea of organizational control or as he states ‘control of control’.

I found Wiener’s writings on the topic of cybernetics meshing with society a pivotal piece in understanding the role of human information processing.  The ideology propagated in contemporary practice of revolutionary thought processing has come down to the basic understanding that without an initial catalyst, there wouldn’t be a progression of thought.  Wiener’s example of sensors and the repetition of motion illicit the readers interest in his notion of an ‘ether’ and the process of ‘taping’.  These two rather simple processes are used as a sort of appliqué towards his use of the term ‘kinesthetic sense’ later in the piece.  Combining Wiener’s sequential “if, than’s”, it is clear to see that information processing revolves around a series of interchanging variables and not on a static environment.