Cybernetic Environment: A Historical Reflection on System, Design, and Machine Intelligence

TL;DR

This paper explores the historical development of cybernetics and systems thinking since the 1950s, highlighting landscape architecture's role in materializing cybernetic principles in ecological design and advocating for a new environmental paradigm.

Contribution

It provides a genealogy of cybernetics within landscape architecture and proposes a new paradigm for integrating machine intelligence with environmental design.

Findings

Landscape architects contributed to cybernetics development.

Ecological landscape design embodies cybernetic principles.

A call for a new paradigm in environmental engagement.

Abstract

Taking on a historical lens, this paper traces the development of cybernetics and systems thinking back to the 1950s, when a group of interdisciplinary scholars converged to create a new theoretical model based on machines and systems for understanding matters of meaning, information, consciousness, and life. By presenting a genealogy of research in the landscape architecture discipline, the paper argues that landscape architects have been an important part of the development of cybernetics by materializing systems based on cybernetic principles in the environment through ecologically based landscape design. The landscape discipline has developed a design framework that provides transformative insights into understanding machine intelligence. The paper calls for a new paradigm of environmental engagement to understand matters of design and machine intelligence.