Paul Pangaro and Eve Pinsker
A panel of interlocutors gathers to probe the following: Having been invited to create a Laboratory for Cybernetics (L4C) at a university, it begs the questions,
What is it? What does it comprise?
If “laboratory” means experimental, project-led, student-focused, without fixed curriculum, then what does it offer, what is its “equipment” or “resources”? One emergent response is taking shape at Carnegie Mellon University School of Architecture, in the form of a repository (concepts and materials, models and methods), conversations (networking and collaborating), and other facets. Perhaps the most audacious initiative is the desire to re-braid the fields of Cybernetics and AI, in a world that is feverish for the latter and poised to be enriched by the former.
Other facets of L4C include open-sourcing all collected content, including project outcomes and synergies from shared global archives, as well as a cash prize of USD 5,000 for the best design brief submitted by CMU students. The primary directive is to increase the total number of choices, in line with von Foerster’s Ethical Imperative.
Keywords: cybernetics and AI, laboratory for cybernetics, experimental learning environments, von Foerster ethical imperative, Carnegie Mellon cybernetics
Profiles
Jude Lombardi
As a social worker, Judy worked in nursing homes with the elderly, in residential care with adolescents, and with non-violent offenders in the prison system. She then ran a private practice focusing on the needs of “emotionally disturbed” children, their families, and organisations working with them. As a behavioural consultant, along with others, she developed Behavioural Cybernetics.
In 1996, Judith earned a PhD in Human Relations and Cybernetics. Her dissertation was a contextual essay and video entitled “from what to when is (not) violence?” Her committee members included: Minnie Bruce Pratt, Herbert Brün, Bethe Hagens, Humberto Maturana, Rodney Donaldson and Lisa Werthamer. For the next decade or so, Dr. Lombardi taught a sociology that emphasised generating one's sociological imagination at a university in Baltimore. Here is more on becoming Jude.
In retirement Jude continues exploring cybernetic ways of thinking and being while continuing to create videos, write and present to those interested in and about cybernetics as it relates to social rather than dis-social relations and transformations.
Since 2013, Jude has worked with the honeybees at the Mt. Washington Arboretum, where she helps others learn about, and how to care for, honeybees and other pollinators. She recently published her first graphic novel, The Bees’ Needs.
Jude plays the snare drum in a brass band called the Barrage Band Orchestra.
Paul Pangaro
Carnegie Mellon University
Paul Pangaro’s work explores the role of conversation in design, innovation, interactions, and organisations. His career spans startups and consulting, research and publishing, teaching and performance. With Kate Doyle, he co-organises #NewMacy, an initiative that spans geographies, generations, and disciplines to catalyse conversations that confront the complex challenges of our time. He is the current President of the American Society for Cybernetics and a Visiting Scholar in the School of Architecture and the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University, having served as Professor of Practice in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute for 3.5 years. His product designs, teaching, writing, and research are grounded in the cybernetic theory and methods of Conversation Theory, as developed by Gordon Pask. His presentations, publications, and videos can be found online at pangaro.com.
Eve Pinsker
University of Illinois at Chicago
Eve Pinsker is a Clinical Assistant Professor, Division of Community Health Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, School of Public Health. At UIC, she is a core faculty member of the Doctor of Public Health Leadership Program.
She is an anthropologist who conducted long-term immersion ethnographic fieldwork at multiple levels of political community (village, ethnic, state, national) in the Federated States of Micronesia for her dissertation, followed by many years of experience using modified short-term ethnographic methods for evaluation and developmental evaluation projects, collecting and analysing information on contexts of interest and developing recommendations for action. Eve's work focuses on systems thinking-based ethnographic and process approaches to planning and evaluating collaborative health and community development initiatives—particularly those involving multiple levels of intervention (organisational, local community, national) and partnerships among diverse organisational and community cultures. She chairs the Evaluation Anthropology Interest Group for the National Association for the Practice of Anthropology.
