Mini Symposium 2025 Oct 9 - Paul Pangaro

Mini Symposia Series Name Paul Pangaro Title Cybernetics Escapes the Laboratory: Cybernetics as Anti-Wicked Praxis Date October 9, 2025 Presentation Download presentation Link View Video

Cybernetics Escapes the Laboratory: Cybernetics as Anti-Wicked Praxis

Abstract

When members of the School of Architecture at Carnegie Mellon University were invited to initiate a “laboratory” to situate their research, many probative questions arose for today’s presenter: If Cybernetics is a discipline that forefronts effective action in the world rather than pursuit of verifiable knowledge—then what is a “Laboratory for Cybernetics”?

That puzzle loomed larger than the School’s requirements for launching any new lab: Could its mission be defined in connection to the School’s 21st-century pedagogy of climate change, social justice, and artificial intelligence? Yes—bring it on. Can there be at least three research projects consistent with its mission? Not a problem. Can it identify future funding to support the lab? Will do.

Launched in January 2025, the Laboratory for Cybernetics (Lab4C) opened its virtual doors with a semester-long studio course, an ecosystem of documents, and a dose of audacity. Engaging Wicked Challenges is its studio course, serving as an on-ramp to its digital resources and scaffolding student-scholars to collaborate with its human resources, that of in-world practitioners, all to support addressing wicked challenges. Lab4C’s 2025 Cybernetics Prize has awarded $5000 for the best design proposal that embraces Heinz von Foerster’s Ethical Imperative, that is, increasing human agency and human potential through design. The most ambitious project of Lab4C may be Re-Braiding Cybernetics & AI, intent on bringing the two fields into conversation and even cooperation, catalyzed by a book exhibit, a symposium, and a publication, all occurring in 2027.

Today’s mini-symposium begins with glimpses into the intentions and projects of Lab4C and segues to the proposal of “praxis-sourcing”, an evolutionary model for impact that is not confined to a single laboratory. Can a cybernetic approach to designing design across a collective of organizations—academic design programs yet also NGOs and corporations—better untangle our 21st-century’s wicked challenges? How might we define the necessities for 21st-century design education? What advantages would come from bridging the boundaries of disciplines, geographies, and generations?

While much neglected, Cybernetics has recently been called out as something to revive, to teach, to practice, to help a world gone wild. What degree of practicality, in balance with an appropriate scale of audacity, forms an energetic tension for an open-source, anti-wicked praxis of Cybernetics, to respond to the wicked pandemics of our time?

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Cybernetics Escapes the Laboratory - Paul Pangaro

Short Bio

Paul Pangaro's career spans startups, teaching, performance, and consulting. He has been applying models of conversation to the design of interactions and organizations since his PhD in Cybernetics (Brunel UK) with Gordon Pask. His research and making are grounded in the twin goals of “design as conversation” and “design for conversation”, increasing possibilities for the designer or user to be or to become whom they wish. Pangaro and TJ McLeish, as master fabricator, created a full-scale, faithful visual and behavioral replica of Gordon Pask’s Colloquy of Mobiles, displayed at Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2020 and is now in the permanent collection of ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany. After three years as Professor of the Practice in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at CMU, in July 2022 Pangaro moved to the College of Fine Arts and has recently launched the Laboratory for Cybernetics (Lab4C) with the intention of becoming a global resource for student-scholars particularly focused on “wicked challenges.” He is President of the American Society for Cybernetics since 2021 and co-lead of the #NewMacy Initiative where his personal commitment is to respond to the pandemic of today’s AI algorithms. His work can be found at pangaro.com.