Who we are and what we do?
The American Society for Cybernetics was founded in 1964 in Washington, DC to encourage new developments in cybernetics as an inter-/trans-/meta-disciplinary field.
Ever since, it has remained at the forefront of cybernetic thinking and doing. Society members have made cybernetics central to their work in biology and the life sciences, the arts, medicine, therapy (psychological and social), mathematics, the physical sciences and engineering, design, management, and business. They have reached out to other societies and groups interested in similar areas and approaches. Remarkable people have joined and been recognized by us.
We understand cybernetics as being profoundly interested in and shaped by circularity, recursion, construction and reflexivity, and we constantly consider what cybernetic actions might be and when they should and should not be taken, continuing to consider how to behave in a cybernetic manner—without denying the value, on occasion, of behaving in more traditional ways. We recognize the centrality of the presence of the observer in observing, the speaker in speaking and the actor in acting.
