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August 23, 2026 | RSDX–ASC
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Time for cybernetics? Conversational Confluences marks the fifth year that the American Society for Cybernetics has contributed an RSD programme supporting transdisciplinary work (see ASC+RSD events). All eight ASC sessions are online, with quick registration and no paywall. Explore plurality as it unfolds across RSD15 from August through October. RSDX.ONLINE/JOIN.
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Conversational Confluences
Eight sessions online, August 24–27, 2026
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The American Society for Cybernetics held its 2026 conference, Conversational Confluences, in Ouro Preto, Brazil, in early August. The RSDX–ASC online series now brings that conference into the context of RSD15's Designing within a Plural World. It's an opportunity to rethink what connects the two.
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The conference takes its title from the Brazilian thinker and activist Nêgo Bispo, for whom confluence describes the way rivers meet without dissolving into one another, strengthened by the encounter rather than absorbed by it. He sets this against transfluence, the law under which things mix but do not come together. Cybernetics and systemic design have long circled one another, and the series treats that relationship as an open question rather than a settled convergence: difference as a source of mutual appreciation rather than assimilation.
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Six ASC 2026 conference tracks continue online over four days, framed by an opening session on August 24 and a closing session. Eight sessions in all.
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Claudia Westermann
American Society for Cybernetics
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ASC THEMES
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100 Years of Stafford Beer in Conversation with Latin America—with Allenna Leonard, Juliana Mariano Alves and colleagues from Metaphorum.
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On Beer's centenary, an opportunity to hear from close collaborators and others on how his vision of freedom, viability and autonomy continues to resonate in Latin American experiences of social, ecological and institutional transformation.
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Pluriversal More-than-Human Design—with Annan Zuo, Claudia Westermann and Frederick Steier.
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How a cybernetic approach facilitates more-than-human co-creation of living systems, with talks on algal interfaces, multispecies domesticity, agriculture, and designing with biological and computational others.
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Mapping as Practice of Recursive Becoming—with Benjamin Bacon and Vivian Xu, from the ASC's Art, Media, Cybernetics Working Group.
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Three panels reframing cartography as a practice grounded in intimacy rather than surveillance, in reciprocal conversation rather than unilateral observation: psychogeography and cybernetic cities, fire recursivities in the Brazilian savanna, counter-mapping of informal networks.
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Designing Relational Futures through Indigenous Wisdom, Quantum Theory, and AI Reflexivity—with R. Eva King and Frederick Steier.
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Three domains treated as tributaries of a single river of systemic meaning-making.
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A Second-Order Cybernetic Intervention—with Arantzazu Saratxaga Arregi.
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Second-order cybernetics as a response to the epistemological foundations of algorithmic governance.
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Gathering the Dispersed, Refocusing the Distracted—with José dos Santos Cabral Filho, Sandro Luis Schlindwein and Mateus van Stralen.
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After Vilém Flusser: welcoming problems before attempting to resolve them.
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Schedule overview
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All eight sessions, in eight time zones, are previewed below. Dates are given in the Ouro Preto column; (+1) marks the next day. Perth and China share a time zone in August, and Melbourne remains on standard time until October.
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When you join the hub, session times will automatically appear in your time zone.
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Conversational Confluences Podcast
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Abbie vanMeter set out to conduct interviews at onsite events and capture in-situ accounts of participants' experiences in the moment. In this podcast, Abbie talks with eight participants at the 2026 ASC Conference, recorded in August in Ouro Preto, Minas Gerais, Brazil.
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Stories Lived. Stories Told. is an initiative of the CMM Institute for Personal and Social Evolution.
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Celebrating 100 years of Stafford Beer
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SEPTEMBER 17–19 | Alliance Manchester Business School. Organised in collaboration with the World Organisation for Systems and Cybernetics, the Centre for Systems Studies (University of Hull), and the International Federation for Systems Research, with parallel events at partner organisations including the American Society of Cybernetics and the International Society of Systems Sciences.
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Meet Metaphorum
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Metaphorum is a global community advancing Stafford Beer’s legacy in organisational cybernetics, offering extensive online resources, regular webinars, and Viable System Model training and certification. It also promotes Team Syntegrity, Beer’s non-hierarchical method for equitable, participatory dialogue and collective action on complex organisational issues.
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Do you know Allena?
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Meet Allenna Leonard, cybernetician, longtime collaborator and life partner of Stafford Beer. A former president of the American Society for Cybernetics and the International Society for the Systems Sciences, she is a founding member and current director of Metaphorum, where she continues to advance Beer's work in organisational cybernetics.
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Cybernetics & public administration
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July 1–3 marked The Cybernetics Society's annual conference, this year commemorating Stafford Beer's centenary. Themes included Stafford Beer and his relevance to 2026, information processing, badlands and space governance, quantum life sciences, and ethics and AI. Dan Davies, author of The Unaccountability Machine, gave the provocation "Taming the unaccountability machine: Cybernetics and public administration."
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SDA is a member-supported community. Please consider becoming a member of the Systemic Design Association or donating to help sustain the communications platform and RSD repository, and maintain no-cost and low-cost access to SDA events, such as the Relating Systems Thinking and Design Symposium.
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