Why We Need to Know Cybernetics // Part I

Introduction & Examples, from Personal Health to Product Design

Photos of the author climbing in Portland, Oregon.
Image credit: Dmitry A. Novikov

Cybernetics and supply chain disruptions

Image via Midjourney

Cybernetics and health

I used to get a sinus infection around the same time every year. Sometimes the infection took months to recover, as I was often traveling and didn’t have time understand or care for it.

Child transfixed by the wonder of a fictional Victorian humidifier to relieve sinus symptoms in the wintertime (Case + Midjourney).

Cybernetics and product design

There are so many complex systems in our lives that we’ve taken for granted for so long, that when we build new processes, we forget to consider how they integrate — or don’t, even to the point of grating on each other. When we forget to design and build from first principles, we risk making non-maintainable processes that can easily break.

Image via the BBC
Source

--

--

Design advocate, speaker and author of Calm Technology. Former Research Fellow at MIT Media Lab and Harvard BKC. Co-founder DAO DAO.

Get the Medium app

A button that says 'Download on the App Store', and if clicked it will lead you to the iOS App store
A button that says 'Get it on, Google Play', and if clicked it will lead you to the Google Play store
Amber Case

Design advocate, speaker and author of Calm Technology. Former Research Fellow at MIT Media Lab and Harvard BKC. Co-founder DAO DAO.