Author’s Response: Beyond Application

Abstract

I wish to thank all commentators for their stimulating contributions. The first thing to note in response to these seven commentaries is the range of ground they cover, indicating the wide potential of the relation between cybernetics and design research to inform both fields. It is significant that many of the aspects raised by commenters are focused on core topics of cybernetic research: computing technology (Mateus van Stralen; Christiane Herr); cognition (Andrea Jelic); and, broadly, the relationship between research/theory and action/practice, which is a focus of Herr and Michael Hohl, and underlies the concerns of Jose Cabral, Dai Griffiths and Tom Scholte. As Karl Muller (2010) has noted, there is a need to focus on core topics in order to reinforce the coherence of radical constructivism (RC) and second-order cybernetics (SOC) as a research field. Muller’s remarks could be taken as a call for a turn away from topics such as design that have been prominent in recent cybernetics. These commentaries, and the research to which they point, suggest that design may instead offer a focus in which a number of such core issues can be explored.