Today I’m looking at design from a cybernetics viewpoint. My inspirations come from cybernetics and design theorists Ross Ashby, Stafford Beer, Klaus Krippendorff, Paul Pangaro, and Ranulph Glanville. I was curious about how the interface of a device conveys the message to the user on how to interact with it. For example, if you see a button, you are invited to press it. In a similar vein, if you see a dial, you know to twist it. By looking at the ideas of cybernetics, I feel that we can expand on this further.

Ross Ashby, one of the pioneers of cybernetics, defined “variety” as the number of possible elements (or states) of a system. A stoplight, for example, generally has three states—red, green, and yellow. Additional states are possible, such as blinking red, no light, or simultaneous combinations of two or three lights. Of all the possible states identified, the stoplight is constrained to have only three states. If the stoplight is not able to regulate traffic acting in tandem with similar stoplights, traffic gets congested and results in a standstill. Thus, we can say that the stoplight was lacking the requisite variety.

 …