Purpose To develop a conception of experience and action. Design/methodology/approach Phenomenological concepts of subjectivity and meaning are combined with cybernetic concepts of constraint. Findings A unified theory of action and experience is developed. Originality/value The theory provides a scientific, cybernetic, unifying theory of experience and action applicable to individuals, groups ...

Serendipity, the faculty of making fortunate and unexpected discoveries by accident, is recognized today as playing a key role in sparking innovation. It does not seem, however, to be manageable by any means, which has kept it as a relatively unexplored subject of research. This paper claims that, although it may not be possible to program serendipity, it is quite possible to program for serend...

Norbert Weiner defined and christened the domain of Cybernetics as "the science of control and communication in machines and in living beings." This book, a monograph in a series entitled American Lectures in Living Chemistry, is an excellent illustration of scientific problems in "control and communication." One problem of the text is its language. The book is written in English and no mention...

Usually, experts on wearable technologies decide the physiognomy of the designed devices following their opinion or intuition. In general, no study with real users is conducted to ensure the proposed device is ergonomic. This situation is especially critical when working on cybernetic gloves, since the hand performs high precision movements and has a high sensitivity. Therefore, in this paper w...

It has been shown that the cybernetic approaches can efficiently be used for analysis and design of complex networked systems. Still, the earlier discussions were bound to the actual application domain at hand. This paper gives more intuition in what truly takes place in a cybernetic system from another point of view. Information theory, and specially the concept of entropy, offer a yet more ge...

We demonstrate strong experimental support for the cybernetic model based on maximizing carbon uptake rate in describing the microorganism's regulatory behavior by verifying exacting predictions of steady state multiplicity in a chemostat. Experiments with a feed mixture of glucose and pyruvate show multiple steady state behavior as predicted by the cybernetic model. When multiplicity occurs at...