Designing Tomorrow: Strategic Design Tactics to Change Your Practice, Organisation, and Planetary Impact

Martin Tomitsch and Steve Baty at ANU. 
Photo by Tom Worthington CC-BY 2014.

Greetings from the Australian National University, where Martin Tomitsch and Steve Baty are talking about their book "Designing Tomorrow: Strategic Design Tactics to Change Your Practice, Organisation, and Planetary Impact". The event is hosted by ACM SIGCHI Chapter for Canberra and the ANU School of Cybernetics. The approach advocated in the book will be very familiar to engineers, computer professionals and other design based disciplines, but may also be of interest to others.

Future History of AI

Greetings from "AI and Other Scientific Fables" at the ANU School of Cybernetics. We have tech storytellers exploring how AI is changing our lives. Note that the term "Cybernetics." is used in a more social was in this school, than the way the computing profession understands it, as being about technical control systems. The first reading was by Kathryn Gledhill-Tucker of "Campfire". The event ends with a screening of Moonrise and Requiem by Ceridwen Dovey and Rowena Potts (Dovey is the author of "Life After Truth"). The event is in person and live online.

I wrote some future history for an ACT Government project "Canberra 2020: World Information Capital" (Informatics Magazine, September 1993). In this I had Canberra as the capital of the world, with a massive computer complex providing world government from under the Bruce Technology Park. The original version had an automated missile defence system nicknamed "Skywalker" shooting down an off course light aircraft. In a case of life imitating art, decades later I was tutoring a team of students helping test the radar for Australia's anti-missile system (there is a test radar for this in Canberra). 

Cybernetic Leadership.

Professor Genevieve Bell,
Director of the School of Cybernetics 
at the Leadership Launch.

Greetings from the Australian National University where the new School of Cybernetics is launching a program in Cybernetic Leadership, funded by the Menzies Foundation. There is a whitepaper available: "Redefining Leadership in the 21st Century: the View from Cybernetics". Cybernetics started as a engineering concept, where feedback lops are used to control the operation of s system. But this has been broadened to investigate complex systems, and the human aspects of them. As a computer professional interested in the human aspects, I often bump up against these issues.