Ranulph Glanville

Life

Glanville trained as an architect at the Architectural Association in London, where Gordon Pask taught. He then took a PhD in cybernetics under Pask at Brunel University (1975), and later a second doctorate in architecture and learning. For much of his career he taught at Portsmouth, held visiting professorships around the world, including in Leuven and at RMIT in Melbourne, and in his last years taught at the Royal College of Art in London. He led the American Society for Cybernetics from 2009 until his death in 2014.

Influences

Pask was his teacher and lifelong reference point. From Heinz von Foerster he took the focus on observers and self-reference, and he often cited Margaret Mead’s 1967 challenge to apply cybernetics to cybernetic organisations themselves.

Contributions

Glanville’s doctoral “theory of objects” proposed that objects are stable patterns of self-observation, a radical development of second-order cybernetics. He argued that the black box is the normal condition of knowing: we never see inside other systems, only their behaviour in interaction with us, and that this is a basis for respect rather than a failure.

His best-known theme is that design is cybernetic: designing is a conversation between a designer and their sketches, materials and clients, in which goals are discovered through action. He went further, treating science as a special case of design. His essays are collected in the three volumes of The Black B∞x.

Why it matters today

Glanville’s account of design as conversation is widely taught in design schools and underpins much current work connecting cybernetics with design practice. His view of the black box as a relationship rather than a mystery is a useful lens on systems such as neural networks whose insides we cannot inspect.

Further reading

• Ranulph Glanville, The Black B∞x (3 volumes, 2009–2014)
• Ranulph Glanville, “Try Again. Fail Again. Fail Better: The Cybernetics in Design and the Design in Cybernetics”, Kybernetes (2007)