01_Beer_pg24,89_Beer discusses the nature of individualism and uniqueness of society. He also later goes on to discuss, on inefficiency, that the only way society can become more efficient is to sacrifice freedom and personal liberties. Should the question be asked: “is personal freedom and liberty inherently bad?”; is it a necessity to give up personal freedom to achieve a greater efficiency in society? conversely, would this surrendering of freedom reduce variety, and thereby hinder efficiency?

02_Pask_pg496_Pask discusses, under ‘Speculations’

Concepts in very different disciplines (…..psychology, economics) will be united with the concepts of architecture to yield and adequately broad view of such entities as ‘civilization’…

I think this is an inevitable occurrence as society becomes increasingly connected. However, will this convergence naturally fit into the paradigm of ‘good’ architecture? or will architectural theory as we know it become negatively modified under these outside influences to produce ‘worse’ conditions than we do today?

03_Price_pg56_I take some issue with the concept and design of the Fun Palace; most notably the assumptions made about how people interact and what they find interesting. Price himself describes the work as a ‘short-term toy to enable people to use a building with the same degree of personal immediacy that they are forced normally to reserve for a limited range of pleasures.’ Would a building without specific purpose really attract attention and interest? would it, as price said, be short-term, with people becoming disinterested with the novelty of the space after a while? The adaptability of the system does something to address this, by making a variable space that can change into something new, but is this implementation of full-scale adaptability and impermanence of space something that people would feel intimately comfortable with? or would it feel jarring, with changes in environment seemingly at random?

1.“Freedom lost is not by accident, but as the output of a system designed to curb liberty. My message is that we must redesign that system, to produce freedom as an output.”(P.99 The free man in cybernetic world) Why system must redesign ? If system redesign, the third country will be not treat oppressively ? If one country are stronger than other, they would not care about the system. It is all about choice not a systems.

2.The author use salesman to illustrate what is “the amplification of regulatory” , also he said that “ The point is that our variety attenuators are built into the system. Freedom of choice has gone down this particular drain.” (P.25, 26 The disregarded tools of modern man) He points out that the computer, teleprocessing and techniques of the science are a tool to make variety amplification.
Is computer really helps people have more freedom in the society or we manipulate by technology such as computer or other techniques of science ?

3.“As a result of these, essentially cybernetic, sub-theoretical developments, many architects wanted to design systems but, on the whole, they were expected to design buildings. To a large extent this is still (quite reasonably) true. All the same, there is a sense in which the brief given to an architect has widened during the last decades.” and “Gaudi did so using physically static structures”. (P.495, 496 The architectural relevance of cybernetics)
Gaudi is not only designed a system but also designed a building. I was wondering what the differences are between Gaudi and Santiago Calatrava ? Sometime I felt they are old and new, quite slimily but not the same.

The Architectural Relevance of Cybernetics (Gordon Pask)

1. The author described “pure” architecture was descriptive and prescriptive but little to predict. In contrast,  “the cybernetic theory has an appreciable predictive power.” (496) Architects can model an organizing system to predict the change of the development or spatial influence. He also stated that nowadays, system oriented thinking is a demand whereas in the past, it was just a desire. By utilizing the cybernetic theory, how does this changes the role and expectation of architects?

Designing Freedom (Stafford Beer)

2. Beer stated, ” The freedom we embraced must yet be ‘in control.’ ” (88) Control means to be ultrastable or “capable of adapting smoothly to unpredicted change.” We need a cybernetic map in order to regulate our freedom. I am just wondering in what ways does cybernetics provide us more freedom or more constraints?

3. “I can tell you flatly that they do not make mistakes. People make mistakes. People who program computers make mistakes.” (27) I think it is impossible to make any computer program perfect. In my opinion, if something is perfect that means the outcome matches the expectations. Sometime there will be some unexpected results depending on the varieties of inputs. Even if those results are positive, I wouldn’t say that it is perfect because it wasn’t what I expected.

Q1: From Stafford Beer’s “The Disregarded Tools of Modern Man”:

Beer mentions that “The trouble with our societary institutions, of course, is that the citizen has no alternative but to use them.” (pg. 22) Is this implying an inevitable downfall of these “societary institutions” to better ones, due to eventual inability to satisfy the needs of the citizen?

Q2: From Stafford Beer’s “The Disregarded Tools of Modern Man” and “The Free Man in a Cybernetic World”:

“It is a free gift for all who have the courage to accept it. Remember: our culture teaches you not intellectual courage, but intellectual conformity.” pg. 20

“The continuous process of liberating our minds from the programs implanted in our brains is a prerequisite of personal evolution.” pg.86

Is this notion of “liberation from our learned societal context” inherent to the time of publication (1973), or is it still relevant now?

Q3: From Stafford Beer’s “The Free Man in a Cybernetic World”:

“We have to find a way by which to turn science over to the people. If we can do that, the problem of elitism disappears.” pg.89

I do not agree with this, as it sounds rather idealistic to assume that there is such a way to erase elitism. Is elitism not inevitable? There will always be a group that holds a greater grasp and understanding of science and technology above the masses regardless of its level of proliferation.

DESIGNING FREEDOM / STAFFORD BEER

A VSM model by Stanford Beer, consist of the recursive framework of other VSMs where the variety ( possible states of a system )  between management, process and environment gets amplified and filtered. This amplification and filtration of variety occurs based on the feedback system, that  modifies the input based on the output in order to get closer to the desired output.

Q) Who regulates the variables for this amplification and filtration? When compared to the functioning of brain being the controller for the nervous system, does it mean there is a separate control system external to the VSM?

Q) Is it highly ambitious to visualize economies that work like real time control systems with significant and immediate data fed into simulations for better decision making? What could be some practical approaches to using a viable system model in this context?

ARCHITECTURE RELEVANCE / GORDON PASK

As speculated, with inclusion of cybernetic theory, “ Concepts in very different disciplines ( notably social, anthropology, psychology, sociology, ecology and economies ) will be unified with the concepts of architecture to yield an adequately broad view of such entities as civilization, city or educational system.”

Also, Cybernetic model of designing a reactive and adaptive environment suggests designing a system involving programmable interactions between and static and dynamic entities.

Q) How will this shift affect the role of architects, their skill sets and processes. How would a collaborative model between architects, programmers, interaction designers and others function?  What would the interface look like? And in case of a breakdown, who would be responsible?

1 – A Liberty Machine in Prototype, Stafford Beer – On page 43, Beer talks about the idea that the government can retrieve a large amount of information, and then process it down through filters to receive only the information which is important in real time, as a warning or other readout for the officials to use. However, he does not really address very well how this information will be compiled and sent to this processing place, or how they will deal with “public” vs “private” information. He does say on page 46 that less information will be needed, but doesn’t address for example some of the major criticisms of major data collection on private people which has occurred in recent years.

2 – The Free Man in a Cybernetic World, Stafford Beer – Beer talks on page 92 and 93 about mass availability of the faster communications, so that the masses can “engage in their personal evolution – by guiding their own learning, and editing their own input”. Is this something we are moving towards, or have seen pass us by? Is this online wealth of knowledge which we can access allowing us to have personal evolution?

3 – The architectural relevance of cybernetics, Gordon Pask – I was very interested in his definition of “mutualism” in that architects don’t just design buildings, they design systems which humans move through and around. This idea of a building as a small node on a bigger system brings with it a larger definition of what it means to be an architect, as well as his other definition of functionalism which is not just about usefulness in a specific sense but about a more broad sense of purpose in a larger community or ecosystem of people.

I think my comments on this weeks readings might be best addressed not by going through individual quotes, but from a more birds-eye perspective of them as a constellation of texts that address issues of great importance, but through a seemingly naive view.

The biggest takeaway from these is that this notion of feedback  can let us know about all the states of a system before we enter into it. While this is clearly not a realistic methodology for a variety of reasons*, the notion of feedback in a system is compelling. Using feedback to know what we can control and influence in an environment is a valuable tool for sure, but does this scale well?

If we are building a home, the number of factors that need to be taken into account are enormous (occupancy, space, amount of light throughout the year, use of the rooms, materials used, and so on). However, it is a manageable number of things. When we start to use these same tools to control and predict largely chaotic systems (like the environment, or capital markets), we must simplify the data, else the model will be too large for any reasonable analysis or observation. As soon as a simplification happens, we lose an accurate predictive model for feedback, and our system can quickly give us results that are bad (bad in the sense that the information is not accurate, it very well may be what we want to hear).

Applying these ideas of cybernetics to controlled systems works, but expecting that a computer model will save us all is total folly. I would hope that in the intervening years since these texts were written we’ve learned a few things about this, but given the financial, political, and social models that are devolving, despite computers telling us otherwise, I’m holding out little hope.

*for example, as a system changes, the models need to change with it. If you model your system on the initial state, and use updated data from a changed system, you’ll then need to renegotiate the system all over again to accommodate for the changes.

1. ARCHITECTURE RELEVANCE / GORDON PASK – “Parque Guell, which at a symbolic level, is one of the most cybernetic structures in existence” —— I would like to find more clarity in this statement. Does Pask describe this structure as cybernetic because it creates such a vibrant dialog as it blends architecture and art?
2. DESIGNING FREEDOM / STAFFORD BEER – “Civilization is being dragged down by its own inefficiency. We cannot feed the starving; we cannot stop war; we are in a terrible muddle with education, transportation, the care of the sick and the old; institutions are failing, and often we feel unsafe in the streets of our own cities.” (p 89) —— technology is moving forward, claiming to be the savior of the world, but it has not done this, its only contributed to the problem if anything (weapons, antibiotics, food hormones). furthermore, the problems cited here are not created or solved by technology, they are human problems. – over population due to reproduction and religion, and wars due to money, religion, power. Beer says we are being dragged down by our inefficiency. I would argue we are becoming more efficient but not in a direction that is saving us. Or maybe that is the true inefficiency?
3. DESIGNING FREEDOM / STAFFORD BEER – “do not even like the wretched things. If one of those unworkable institutions we were discussing buys a computer, what happens? It uses the thing, please note at enormous “cost”, to do more elaborately exactly what was done before. And, as we know, that didn’t work.”(pg26) —— I would like to better understand the reason for this example Beer brings up, about the computer manufacturer with the sales campaign to convert everything over to computers – which segways into Beer’s next idea that computers cannot make mistakes, only humans. Why does he think there will be catastrophic collapse when computers generate “untold randomness” – is he saying computerization of all things will create more data then humans can possibly handle?

1
To advocate for a new science of effective organization, Stafford Beer draws numerous parallels between economy and nature, and more specifically, institutional systems and natural systems. If nature works according to known dominant laws, such as the theory of Relativity and the Second Law of Thermodynamics (pp.19), which laws underpin economy and its institutions? Later on, he suggests that in societary systems, Ashby’s law of Requisite Variety (which is key in his theory of Cybernetics) is the equivalent of the law of gravity in the physical universe (pp.22). In fact, nature itself is operating on Ashby’s law: when left unobstructed, nature is able to reach variety equilibrium (pp.29). Tuned with the environmental anxiety of his time, Beer states that “the total problem of the environment [is a] huge aggregation of unmapped variety” (pp.37). Is this excess variety the inevitable result of human intervention? Which subsystems (nations, governments and their departments) generated such a “global mess”(p.35) within the global system?

The United Nations is an intergovernmental institution designed to coordinate this “global mess” and maintain the stability of the global system.  Around the same time Beer is writing, the Club of Rome (a UN-supported think-tank comprised of computer scientists and cyberneticians) designed a highly complex model of the global system, run numerous simulations and computed catastrophic conclusions. From the Liberty Machine to the Doomsday machine?

More on the Club of Rome and the role of Cyberneticsc in the BBC documentary trilogy “All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace”(link) by Adam Curtis (See Part 2, after 27.40)

2
Throughout his essay, Gordon Pask traces the changing relationship of rules to form and the role of the architect as the translator in-between. The “pure architecture” paradigm operated on rules that were primarily visual and permanent: architectural practice was merely the application of style and stability to form – and that was the chief role of the architect (p69). However, Pask’s new theory suggests that architects are system designers, primarily concerned with immaterial properties of the system (such as control, communication and evolution) (p71). To what extent is this a top-down versus a bottom-up approach? Pask describes environments that act as collaborators of the inhabitants (p.74), but in which ways is this dialogue still mediated through the total authority of the architect as the sole system designer?

3
The question of problem-solving as the moral duty of the architect overarches all three readings. Beer challenges the timeless demand of solutions to problems, suggesting that it stubbornly preserves the old state of things. Instead, he declares that “it is better to dissolve problems than to solve them” (Beer, 42). On the same page, Cedric Price believes “architecture should have little to do with problem-solving – rather, it should create desirable conditions and opportunities” (Price,92). The cybernetic theory of architecture is certainly not a solutionist one. However, Pask points out how unprecedented problems that couldn’t be solved with ‘pure architecture’ tools, triggered unique (albeit not unifying or universal) solutions that prepared the ground for a new kind of new architecture’ (Pask, 69). In what ways are problems an evolutionary tool then? Why did Beer and Price find problems irrelevant? Finally, in hindsight, what are the problems of the cybernetic theory of architecture itself?