Cybernetics Knowledge domains in Engineering systems ( fall , 2000 )

Cybernetics is the study of human/machine interaction guided by the principle that numerous different types of systems can be studied according to principles of feedback, control, and communications. The field has a quantitative component, inherited from feedback control and information theory, but is primary a qualitative, analytical tool – one might even say a philosophy of technology. Cybernetics is characterized by a tendency to universalize the notion of feedback, seeing it as the underlying principle of the technological world. Closely related variants include: information theory, human factors engineering, control theory, systems theory. Norbert Wiener founded the field with his in his 1948 book Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine which articulated the marriage of communication and control for a generation of engineers, systems theorists, and technical enthusiasts of varied stripes. Since then cybernetics has had a significant intellectual impact on a wide variety of disciplines across the globe, although as a discipline itself it remains unclear and fragmented, and has essentially faded from prominence in the United States, although it remains more influential in Europe. Still, it had great influence on numerous other of the systems sciences, including some of the most prominent today, and it helped initiate a discourse and a worldview that is deeply embedded in today’s technological culture.