WK11
Cybernetics and Design
from alternative cybernetics to co-productive intelligence · control → co-becoming · OPJD · technodiversity
Cybernetics and Design
LAAR 61400 · Week 11
Part I

An alternative cybernetics

Part II

Co-productive intelligence

Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics, 1948 — title slide
The black box — communication at the center of control
Sensing, modeling, actuating — the feedback mechanism of modern machines
The smart city as the most ambitious cybernetic project
Yuk Hui — cybernetics as a universal mode of thinking
Object-Oriented Ontology — things as withdrawn and uncontrollable
An alternative framework — Coding, Choreographing, Attuning
Choreographing — AI agents and emergent ecologies
Lawrence Halprin's hand-drawn RSVP Cycles diagram — Resources, Scores, Valuaction, Performance
Scores communicate but do not control.Lawrence Halprin · The RSVP Cycles, 1970s
A person holding up a drawn circular movement score
People enacting the score, moving through a park
Alternative cybernetics — from control to co-becoming
Part I

An alternative cybernetics

Part II

Co-productive intelligence

A hand-drawn entanglement diagram — a human figure holding a phone, wired by dotted lines to a brain, gut microbes, a circuit board, a drone, birds, a tree and its roots, a wolf, a hare, a crab and an oyster.
A winding subway-map path (Draft Slides → Add Charts → Polish → Final Deck) beside the line ‘One prompt, job done.’
‘Slides in 10 minutes. Not 10 PM.’
GPT-generated presentation board — ‘One Place. Four Seasons’ waterfront wetland
GPT-generated presentation board — ‘One Landscape. Four Seasons’ seasonal wetland
GPT-generated presentation board — ‘Reclaimed Ground’ post-industrial landscape
GPT-generated presentation board — ‘Educational Access’ Harlem & South Bronx map

A chatbot is a person in a locked room — a prompt in exchange for a response. MCP unlocks the door: the agent walks the corridor, opens rooms, and picks up tools.

Chatbot
Agent
Interaction
One prompt → one response
Takes a task apart, acts, self-corrects in a loop
Room analogy
Sealed room; you pass notes under the door
MCP unlocks the door — walks the corridor, opens other rooms
Reach
Text out; no hands, no eyes
Tools: terminal, files, software, connectors (MCP)
Memory
Stateless turn
Managed context across many steps
The craft
Prompt engineering — word the question well
Context / harness / loop engineering — choreograph the work
Autonomy
You steer every step
You delegate a goal; it plans, spawns subagents, evaluates
Cybernetic reading
A message exchanged
A loop that acts back on the world

Split care into its effect (the labor executed) and its affect (the toll, the noticing). Machines keep the effect at no cost — but drawing the line concedes the handed-off half is care-less.

Care
Care-less
Tronto's phases
Caring about + care receiving — notice, be affected
Taking care of + caregiving — assume + execute the task
Dimensions
Act + affect + ethics, held together
The act alone, sliced off
Žižek
The double shot — full intensity, presence, cost
Decaffeinated — form kept, active ingredient removed
Toll
Friction, struggle — the toll that keeps it human
Smooth, frictionless — no cost to anyone
Obligation
Reciprocal — you owe it something, you stay with the trouble
None — delivered and done, no strings
The worker
A present, accountable subject
A bundle of functions — intern = renderer = agent
Landscape
Continuous noticing of land, labor, evolving lives
A one-time deliverable, handed over
Jugaad Innovation book cover — the word JUGAAD spelled out from improvised objects
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Try it yourself — Conway's Game of Life

Conway's Game of Life

Four rules · emergent behaviour · click to draw