#NewMacy and American Society for Cybernetics collaborators have contributed many papers, presentations, and workshops and organised full tracks for RSD11, RSD12, and RSD13. Contact Kate Doyle, kate.c.doyle@rutgers.edu and Paul Pangaro, ppangaro@andrew.cmu.edu.

Upcoming cybernetics events can be found on the Systems Community Calendar.

The #NewMacy and ASC collaboration explores relationality in complexity across domains of information mapping, architecture, design, and organisational structures in diverse disciplines, geographies, and generations. #NewMacy and ASC converse with the RSD14 theme, Arcs of Impact, to explore how effects unfold in ever-expanding time and scale through a dynamic interplay of components with wholeness emerging from relationships. The day includes a range of cybernetic enactments, from evolving community engagements in Brazil to creating experimental glossaries and archives, developing laboratory approaches for student-focused curricula, and studying the environmental interdependence of honeybees. The sessions open with a speculative address on language-in-action hinged on uncertainty, moves through questions of design ethics and pedagogies, and ends with organisation and modelling of viable systems.

In a world where our actions create a ripple effect, we ask: how can systemic design become a living ecology that catalyses conversation?

#NewMacy and the American Society for Cybernetics hosted a community-led programme of sessions independently organised by people working in transdisciplinary spaces. The single-track online Currents in Cybernetics series featured discussions, panels, and two discovery sessions: The Transformations Community and #NewMacy. The series of three talks, Flow, Reflexivity, and Recurson, pick up on key ideas in the confluence of RSD13’s Rivers of Conversations.

Colloquies for Transgenerational Collaboration considered the wicked challenges of our time, including climate change, population growth, totalitarian regimes, terrorism, economic insecurity, and systemic inequities. These challenges, recursive in nature, demand that we grapple with complex situations, define their scope, evolve our thinking, and create prototypes—all while navigating obstacles to progress and maintaining our passion for meaningful change.

The sessions encouraged participants to consider how they see the world, what they desire, and what they want to change. Contributions examined the richness of transdisciplinary collaboration through various conceptual lenses and welcomed and encouraged alternative approaches, fostering diverse perspectives on addressing these urgent challenges.

This programme was the design outcome of the Carnegie Mellon University project-based special topics seminar Collaborations for Wicked Challenges. In spring 2023, Paul Pangaro, Visiting Scholar in the School of Architecture and School of Design, taught the seminar to both graduate and undergraduate students.

Different Stories in Design marked the first year of collaborative transdisciplinary programming for RSD, developed in partnership with #NewMacy and the American Society for Cybernetics, during RSD11 hosted by the University of Brighton. The work of cybernetician Gregory Bateson provided a valuable foundation for #NewMacy sessions, which fostered conversations for action across disciplines, geographies, and generations, grounded in systemic principles, processes, and communities. The programme introduced the #NewMacy initiative and featured six studios at RSD11, designed to catalyse action-oriented dialogue among individuals and communities. These sessions aimed to consider the possibility of immediate change while focusing on systemic transformations.