Cybernetics and the Constructed Environment

<p>Grounded in contemporary landscape architecture theory and practice<i> Cybernetics and the Constructed Environment</i> 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.</p><p>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.</p>