American Society for Cybernetics

The American Society for Cybernetics (ASC) was founded in 1964 in Washington, D.C., to promote cybernetics as a field and to connect researchers across disciplines.

History

The society’s early years drew on the Macy Conference generation. At its first annual symposium in October 1967, Margaret Mead gave the address “The Cybernetics of Cybernetics”, asking the society to apply cybernetic understanding to itself. The phrase became the slogan of second-order cybernetics, which Heinz von Foerster championed and which came to define the ASC’s identity from the 1970s onwards.

Presidents have included Stuart Umpleby, Ranulph Glanville and Paul Pangaro. The society awards the Norbert Wiener Gold Medal and the Warren McCulloch Award.

Character

The ASC is known for conferences that experiment with their own format, treating the conference itself as a cybernetic system: conversation-based sessions, participatory design, art and performance alongside papers. Its members come from design, education, management, therapy, art and philosophy as much as from engineering.

Further reading

• Margaret Mead, “The Cybernetics of Cybernetics”, in Purposive Systems (1968)