Cybernetics and the Constructed Environment Design Between Nature and Technology
- Taylor & Francis Routledge [Imprint] 2024
- 1 online resource
Free-to-read
Grounded in contemporary landscape architecture theory and practice, Cybernetics and the Constructed Environment blends examples from art, design, and engineering with concepts from cybernetics and posthumanism, offering a transdisciplinary examination of the ramifications of cybernetics on the constructed environment. Cybernetics, or the study of communication and control in animals and machines, has grown increasingly relevant nearly 80 years after its inception. Cyber-physical systems, sensing networks, and spatial computing-algorithms and intelligent machines-create endless feedback loops with human and non-human actors, co-producing a cybernetic environment. Yet, when an ecosystem is meticulously managed by intelligent machines, can we still call it wild nature? Posthumanism ideas, such as new materialism, actor-network theory, and object-oriented ontology, have become increasingly popular among design disciplines, including landscape architecture, and may have provided transformative frameworks to understand this entangled reality. However, design still entails a sense of intentionality and an urge to control. How do we, then, address the tension between the designer's intentionality and the co-produced reality of more-than-human agents in the cybernetic environment? Is posthumanism enough to develop a framework to think beyond our all-too-human ways of thinking? For researchers, scholars, practitioners, and students in environmental design and engineering disciplines, this book maps out a paradigm of environmentalism and ecological design rooted in non-communication and uncontrollability, and puts a speculative turn on cybernetics. Chapters 8 and 9 of this book are freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
Open licence
eng
9781003320852 9781032341743 9781032341750
10.4324/9781003320852 doi
Architecture Biochemical engineering Biotechnology City and town planning: architectural aspects Cybernetics and systems theory Earth Sciences, Geography, Environment, Planning Environmental science, engineering and technology Information theory Landscape architecture and design Non-graphic art forms Performance art Reference, Information and Interdisciplinary subjects Regional and area planning Research and information: general Social groups, communities and identities Society and culture: general Society and Social Sciences Technology, Engineering, Agriculture, Industrial processes The Arts: art forms The Arts Urban and municipal planning and policy Urban communities