How cybernetics connects
computing, the counterculture,
and design

— [an interactive social graph]


Cybernetics is "deeply inter-twingled" (to borrow Ted Nelson's magical phrase) with the early development of personal computers, the 1960s counter-culture, and the rise of the design methods movement (which enjoyed a recent rebranding as "design thinking").


This piece accompanies an article by the same title that appears in the catalog for an exhibit at the Walker Art Center exhibit, titled "Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia".


We present an interactive social graph, a tool, showing how institutions, conferences, journalists, designers, computer-pioneers and many others are related to the cybernetics.


As a starting point, we select the paper "Behavior, Purpose, and Teleology" authored by a physiologist Arturo Rosenblueth, an engineer Julian Bigelow and a mathematician Norbert Wiener and published in the journal Philosophy of Science.


You can explore the graph. Click on a node to expand the graph and see more connections; click on a name to see details; mouse over links to learn about the nature of connections; drag nodes to reshape the graph.