Some interesting reflections on soft architecture and intellegent environments presented in the form of a parable.

SECURITY IS WHAT YOU WANT, RIGHT?

Y’see, kid, ya can’t make houses of straw or sticks; they aren’t any protection against the wolf! Ya wouldn’t want to be eaten up by the wolf would you? Ya gotta have a brick house: solid, strong (yeah, and lumpish and square and unchangeable and one that will isolate you from the out-of-doors as much as possible). Houses of straw and sticks are play houses: y’know, for kids. Y’don’t live in houses like that! It’s not safe. It’s not sanitary. It’s . . . .

Sure, I know it’s fun, but what’s that got to do with it?  Living is a serious matter! Ya gotta make up your mind; decide what you want to be; commit yourself; don’t take chances; live in a stable neighborhood; acquire the right friends; get a secure job, make something of yourself (and be able to name what you are if anybody asks). Phooey!

Daydream for a Moment

Imagine your own rendering of “The City of the Future”. Take a minute to envision the whole thing now look at it. Does it show one building crane, or a torn-up street, or any other kind of change in process? Be honest, now. Don’t cheat by putting those things in now just because I asked for them. Did your utopian vision allow any room for activities or subsequent changes that you haven’t thought up yet? Did you focus on a snapshot which was to exist for all time? Were you in the city itself, or outside looking at it? Was it a living, growing, evolving creature. Was it uniform or did it offer high variety?

Were you trying to establish some kind of “truth”?

Have you thought of giving relevance a chance?

What might be involved in that?

A CYBERNETICIST’S VIEW

I really didn’t want to insult you but rather to start your participation with me in dealing with some problems. All of us have a large stake these days in improving our environment and our communications. Within the field of cybernetics we think we’ve hit upon some approaches that stand a chance of meeting the criteria of complexity, relevance, and responsiveness that have been plaguing everyone for answers. I would like to address myself particularly to the problems of urban planning, and within that context especially to the relation of the individual participant to the community within which his energies are spent. If that community fails to metabolize his energies in such a way as to enhance both him and its relationship to him then it fails to fulfill itself. Cybernetics concerns itself with the viability of complex organisms.

What do you want a community to be? If you think that question is too broad, try another one which I consider to be equivalent: How are you going to get it across to the members of that community the fact that it has those properties you have wished for it?

For me, the entity that is a community has its existence for the individual within the process by which he explores its responsiveness to him This is true of good politics, good education, good transportation, and it should also be true of good architecture. How often do we ourselves have the opportunity to experience it that way? Buildings, urban environments, landscapes, and even traffic plans all seem to have an immutability akin to a stone wall. Each acquires its character for the potential user upon first exposure within the time it takes for him to discover which limited subset gives him the least grief in going about his survival within a larger system. Thereafter all other topologies of the remainder are simply ignored (as much as possible) because they have become redundant. The overwhelming irrelevance of objects and events around us is attributable largely to their inability to show us any reflection of our passing: to acknowledge some unformulated wish on our part that they might somehow, just for once, be different.

—Different because we willed it so.

—Different because it just happened. We didn’t will it, but we didn’t quite guess it either and so it raised our information level and introduced us to new alternatives.

— Different because the environment has some interesting behavior of its own and is exploring us for our responses of approval or delight.

— Different because if it doesn’t change sometimes we will remind ourselves of its existence by writing obscenities on it or burning it down to make it respond. Or if we are well schooled in the science of labeling, we can name it and let it come to life on picture postcards as an art form–not for living in but for visiting. That’s relevance, baby, you can write on it!

Humans cannot tolerate total low-variety environments for long without becoming sick. We need just the right amount of good guessing to produce the difference that makes a If our behavior makes a difference, then change takes on meaning for us.

CHANGE

We hear a lot about change:

—the necessity for it

—the inexorable fact of it

—the need to be ready for it

—the inevitable discomfort of its coming.

Then from another side we hear the CHANGE—any change—is inherently good. The Change Makers believe the outworn maxim that “more is better” whereupon they throw a heap of garbage in our faces and expect us to groove on it. The conceit of the expert: “do unto others what you believe is right for them”, virtually guarantees irrelevance. Their magical belief is the notion that moving a particular quality of an object or event, such as its size or number or CHANGE from its prior status, is itself inherently good (or bad). That is simply expert nonsense. I repeat: if our behavior makes a difference, then change takes on meaning for us. We have been too well schooled by the truth-sayers who proclaim that meaning can be pointed at: observed. That, too, is nonsense. Meaning can only be discovered in context—and upon that barb hangs not only the modern dilemma of mathematics but also the crux of this article.

CONTEXT

AND WHERE TO FIND IT

Do you know what I mean by CONTEXT? It is the essential ingredient left out in the truths of the “objective” sciences. The context of an object or event is not something you can point to and say: “There it is!” We have no calculus for it (yet). It is generated in your active processes of perception and can never be fully shared by another. That is why it is left out by the truth-sayers. Context acts as an operator[1] to assign meaning to the metaphorical signals we receive from the world, but it is not to be found in those signals. It is to be found, rather, in the consequences of our response to those meanings in that environment. “Get undressed” does not convey the same meaning in a doctor’s office as it does in the back seat of an automobile–but it would be a mistake to identity the background setting in either case as the context. Look to the consequences that are implied and to the relationships that point to them. Keep a running account of the infinite recursion of those relationships and consequences and you may have a handle on the context. It is difficult to simplify further; impossible if what you want is a formula that can be applied in another case. Fine....

FINE….

O.K…..sure….but….what does all of this tell us about urban environments? It tells us quite a lot if we can first leave behind those habits of thought which are based upon context-free premises which promise to lead to easily printable, transmittible “truths” in conclusion. The primary premise that we must drop is the one which removes the untrained community member from participation in the changes occurring in his environment —because he cannot play the game of “all people universals”, is interested in what he personally wants and in his capacity to produce the level of difference he wants when he wants it and so he knows it. What we should be seeking, then, is the means by which members of a community may affect their environment in informal ways which are adequate to return to them a sense of active participation.

There is a payoff which commences almost immediately but is seldom recognized as arising from a common source since it always appears in a garb closely associated with the particular activity in question. Participation is the wellspring of appetite and feeds back upon itself to deepen and enhance the individual’s involvement with the broadening of his own contexts. Some day our psychologists may recognize that appetite is the fount of motivation; hunger is not.

THE COMMUNICATION PROBLEM

I talk to people trained in other ways of thought. They believe, for example, that one must be prepared with a lot of knowledge before one can decide upon action to be taken. They fail to recognize the circuitous, digressive way that thought proceeds to recontext prior experience and thereby imply new responses and new consequences to generate new doings and new seemings and thence to wholly new anticipations which in their turn beget our sudden recognition of “aha!” I wish more people would read “Eolithism and Design”[2] by Hans Otto Storm for it would convince them of the value of whimsical game playing, Undirected exploration—real time groping—seem to have no place in what is taught as real. But what questions, what play is possible if one knows that soon the concrete footings will be hardened and the mortgage money loaned for a specific bank-approved design? The box is cast. Students, be still! / will not accept the common (non)sense. Call me childish if you will.

TOOLS AND TOYS

I want toys as well as tools.

What is a tool to you? To me a tool is an extension of my hand or eye or whatever which allows me to manipulate some part of my world in a way that would otherwise be unreachable or at least more difficult. That manipulation permits me to express some intended change upon the world around me. The scope of my expressions of intention may be severely limited by the tool and my use of it. You give up possibilities for differences that the tool cannot cope with at least while you are conditioned by it: cars produce fat bellies in place of strong legs.

What is a toy? I think of a toy as something which embodies relationships which are otherwise not available for exploration. Its modelling of ordinarily unrealized relationships is based on a revealing shift of size, or of time frame, or of material... or in any event a shift of context which is recognized implicitly. A TOY IS SIMPLY A TOOL TO THINK WITH. It renders inconsequential any “errors” of exploration on your part and allows you to place into juxtaposition many relationships which would be either unlikely or be passed off as irrelevant in a less playful context. Toys invite exploration of what was taken for granted or was otherwise unknown.

A child—or a childlike adult—acquires knowledge of how things work and of how to change their workings through participation in making changes happen, and in simultaneously observing consequences. I emphasize simultaneity. Sending off the Wheaties boxtop and later seeing the prize return in the mail requires mama’s word that something of consequence happened. In real participation results cannot be grossly separated from their instigations. Identification of causes and effects by name cannot lead to a meaningful description of the experience. Purpose and rates-of-change in the direction of that purpose are a more apt statement. Furthermore, the recursiveness of purposive systems is far easier to experience in a playful setting than in an analytical one.

Remember elementary school? On your own time you developed skill in the whole-body movement of game playing. You knew objects in terms of their fun potential. Names were for identification, not for explanation.

Then you were taken into class and told to sit straight. Don’t fidget! Look, listen, speak when called upon. The names were made over into energy consumers and thereby began to acquire a reality of their own. You became a budding expert at taxonomy for that is the major tool of the scholar—and then like any other tool it imposed the conditions upon what it could make. Take a hard look around you to see where you can find a trace of playfulness: one, that is, which still invites you to play; not some frozen metaphor of someone’s long-lost toy.

BRIEF RECAPITULATION

If you want someone to grasp complex relationships and to identify with their processes then you must not only allow him to experience them, but also to have some effect upon them which may be observed first-hand. The involvement that you offer need not be total—the ordinary citizen doesn’t want the responsibility of redesigning the city, nor does the hospital patient want to be his own surgeon—but somewhere there must be an interaction between the individual and his surrounding which admits of his existence because it responds to his use of whatever skills he has.

|AN UNCOMFORTABLE PARALLEL

Architecture and medicine share a common professional fault which at this time in history is doing them both a great disservice. They are conducted as priesthoods: the services they provide are performed upon the recipient but he himself is not allowed participation. Playfulness is taboo. When the modern planners of “health-care delivery services” finally come to recognize that the patient himself is a well-intentioned and highly motivated self-organizing system and can be trusted with information about the meaning of his own physiological signals, then they will begin to achieve some success both in reaching patients and in modernizing their own concepts. The parallel of the medical priestly attitude with the urban design “expert syndrome” is not so immediately obvious because the client in the latter case is not so aware of the source of the pain to be remedied. Nevertheless, his ignorance of the processes of change and of improvement is similarly based: he has never been afforded the chance to participate in the changes which are imposed upon him Some people learn the rudiments of painting walls and fixing leaky plumbing but these efforts are akin to the application of a bandaid on a superficial cut. Nor am I suggesting that they must learn the “expert” task of setting goals and specifications. Not at all! We must build environments that invite their playful participation so that their self-referent knowledge of their community will grow with their appetitive involvement.

COURTEOUS ENVIRONMENTS AND NONROBOTICS

What I have been leading up to is the notion that the environments we provide for people must have some intelligence built into them so that mutual explorations can commence at an informal, unskilled, elementary level. People must be allowed to discover for themselves that it is not difficult—and may be quite enjoyable—to attempt expression of their intentions. A few of us have spent some years toying with such environments and have made inroads into the techniques which can produce behavior that is “courteous” to the participants. I will attempt to set forth a best-to-date description of their properties which will allow you to start toy ing for yourself. If you do not- wish to become involved with real things but prefer simulations, then stop reading here to save time for whatever you think is important.

I am most certainly not intending to raise the spectre of a mechanical or electronic Big Brother Robot which is hyper-attentive to you, watching your every movement and every change of heart-rate or respiration of alpha-rhythm as if to quiz you constantly and surreptitiously to find out what you want. No, that sort of behavior is not at all courteous. That way of imagining “intelligence” assumes that the data which the robot is collecting can somehow be made meaningful (decoded, interpreted, translated) so as to tell it what to do next. It’s the old “decision model” which we have already laid to rest. For example: a ,robot armchair programmed to play soft music every time you get restless, to dim the lights when you rest your head back, or to keep the temperature of the space surrounding you at some preset level. No, and again NO! Therein would irrelevance soon be guaranteed. It happens when a mechanism is preprogrammed (therefore acontextually) to do for us what we will want.

Machines and machine-like human systems that people propose suffer from the decision concepts that theorists find easy to manage. In my opinion a gross misunderstanding prevails about how wants and meanings arise for us. It produces the fallacy which leads people to believe that our brains process sensory data and decodes it into a description of the world around us. I would state the rule I use as follows: In order for us to elicit meaning from any data entering our sensorium, it must either have arisen as the consequence of our effector (outgoing, active) interaction with the source of the information, or at least imply an interaction in which we might engage with some other sensorimotor combination in our perceptual apparatus.

The notion of a necessary participation in the events and objects which we wish to make meaningful to us cannot be overemphasized.

Let’s see if we can arrange matters so that an architectural environment will be able to follow the same rules in dealing with us.

MACHINES AND THEIR CONTROLS

So as to avoid an obvious omission, let me say a few words about the ways in which we now are accustomed to control various “bits” of our environment. For the most part it is by way of switches, valves, control knobs, levers, and other manipulables. We do not communicate with our fellow man in such an arms-length manner which somehow has seemed aprropraite for mechanisms or environments and even homes which have no “life” of their own. The problem has always been—and it remains to this day—that we have not as yet been able to teach our machines to grasp our intentions. Why not? Because those machines have been denied exploratory behavior of their own through which they could establish, in terms of their own self-referent responses, the CONTEXT of our gestures toward them. The alternative that has always been chosen has been to limit the context of those intentions so severely that they are in no danger whatever of being misinterpreted. Turn a valve, push a button, flip a switch: ON-OFF UP-DOWN; easily understood because the context of the gesture is absolutely explicit.

The advent of computers has clouded the issue lamentably because they seem to be able to engage in highly complex exploratory behaviors of which we are incapable unassisted. Overlooked in the wonderment at these feats is the very clear fact that those machines have interpreted the instructions given them as explicit and as meaningful in the extremely narrow contexts of the language in which they are stated. Our fellow man, on the other hand, shares a commonality of experience with us and therefore can identify with us so as to be able to discern the meaning of every word, gesture, or change of timing as they convey our meaning richly in its full context. He can literally (almost) put himself in our place well enough to make the interpretation of our meaning a self-referent act implying his own interaction with our world.

If you don’t believe me, try engaging in a deeply meaningful conversation with a stranger rom a culture foreign to yours the first time you meet. Watch him struggle to find self-referent material in what you place before him. If you can’t find a stranger handy, try a child—or do you doubt that a child has deeply meaningful experiences he would like to be able to convey? Help the child to find a means of interaction common to you: use a toy and watch his understanding of intentionality deepen.

The problems we face in trying to make an environment communicate with us are not so difficult as you might at first imagine. The reason that this is considered by custom difficult is related to the fact that the object of the communication is so intimately bound up with the communicants themselves.

Let me put it another way.

Every dialogue is about something, but the manner of the transaction will depend upon the “distance” between the referent and the place and time of the dialogue itself. I have written elsewhere[3] at some length about this, but let me summarize with an example or two here.

In human experience the most intimate dialogues -as between lovers or mother and child—are carried on in a physical mode of touch and movement which capacity for decisionary behavior during the encounter. One experiences more a sense of flow and this is real in spite of its unaccountability. We use little or no symbolic language in these affairs. We can carry on the dialogue with infants, people of other cultures, animals, or idiots because the referent of the dialogue is each other and the relationship between.

There is a broad spectrum of dialogue situations which shows the “distance” of the referent (what the communicants are referring to) gradually increasing and there is a consequent requirement placed upon the communicants for more elaborate and refined behavior. At the far end of the spectrum one finds symbolic language where the referent need not even exist in fact. Try talking of mathematics with an infant or an animal!

Between the limits of immediacy at one end and symbol at the other we see varieties of situations where people can share a communications medium, but where the direct interaction of each with that medium may itself fall within the awareness of the respondent to a greater or lesser degree. The more immediate that awareness is, the less complicated and metaphorical the language has to be.

I won’t reargue the paper here. I only want to indicate that the kind of dialogue which an environment can be made to engage in with us can and must be pushed as far to the lower, intimate end of the scale as one can manage. There the design and fabrication of courteous environments becomes astonishingly simpler than of ones that manipulate symbols. The materials and techniques may be unfamiliar to most architects, but perhaps that is because flexibility is in the domain of the first little pig.

SOME PIECES OF THE PARADIGM OF COURTEOUS ENVIRONMENTS

What follows are some principles or rules of thumb which have simplified themselves out of a number of years of work toward courteous environments. The numbering is cardinal, so do not let the order imply priority. It is better, as you read them, to jump around and loop back through them a few times at random so that the feeling of flow that they are intended to convey may come across. They do not constitute a handbook of “how-to’s”; I would prefer that they be considered a set of attitudes.

1. The environment and its users interact in a set of physical parameters shared in common; e.g. touch-and-movement or e.g. a change of acoustical properties which allow the participant’s own sounds to change as they are returned to him and change as he moves and listens differently. Parameters which do not have this shared intimacy should be influenced by those that do. Thus, in the environments to which we have become accustomed a shift of our visual attention does not change the light; our act of passive listening does not change the sound.

2. The control of each parameter must be looped back upon itself—simply at least, but with more complex interconnections as the facilities for self-organizing control are augmented. What happens is two fold: the environment acquires an exploratory behavior of its own and that behavior is related to the spread of what has happened and of what will happen. You will not understand if you think of time passage as a thin, straight line. The grammar of purposive behavior is not punctuated by the clock but is expressed in rates of change and rates of rates of change.[4]

3.  Each loop behavior should possess a small amount of random variation. The time-grain or rhythm of these changes should be slow in comparison to the responsiveness of that loop to changes imposed from the outside. Totally random behavior is as discourteous as fixity and is likely to produce anxiety. A certain amount of redundant pattern or melody is pleasing and the slow variations lead to the delight of noticing the differences from anticipated patterns. These are the differences that make a difference.

4. At a more advanced stage, consideration must be given to decision processes and to learning processes. Decision implies the ability to shift abruptly between learned modes of successful behavior. Learning implies that an organism has the ability to acquire (slowly perhaps, but not by punch card program) new modes or patterns that are successful in newer contexts. Let’s keep it simple for now. Literature is available[5] on the how-to’s of appropriate instrumentation for the modeling of these skills.

5. N.B. MEASUREMENTS ARE NOT TO BE MADE UPON THE OCCUPANTS OF AN ENVIRONMENT. THE ONLY MEASUREMENTS ALLOWED ARE THE SELF-REFERENT ONES OF CONTROL SYSTEMS UPON THE PARAMETERS THEY CONTROL. AWARENESS OF OCCUPANT PARTICIPATION IS BY WAY OF THE CHANGES HE IMPOSES UPON ENVIRONMENTAL LOOP BEHAVIORS BECAUSE OF HIS INTERVENTION IN THEM. BIG BROTHER IS NOT WATCHING YOU.

HE IS ENJOYING HIMSELF. SO JOIN THE FUN.

6. Beware at all times of limiting the degrees of freedom of any part of a living environment. Choose with care but with courage. Leave every parameter as free and self-organizing as possible. In the long run it really is not a question of how much looseness and control flexibility you can afford for the project. The playfulness of an environment allows its organizing game to evolve into what did not exist for it before. Remember, we are increasing adaptability![6]

ANTITHESIS

If you have been quietly nodding “of course” to the above, let me introduce some recently published rebuttal. Constantinos A. Doxiadis, in an article entitled: “Ekistics, the Science of Human Settlements”, (Science, Vol. 170, No. 3956) discusses optimization and bids to lay waste a couple of myths. In challenging the “myth of the static plan” he says in part; “We need a room with constant dimensions, a home that gives us a feeling of permanency, a street and a square which do not change and which are esthetically satisfying. Such considerations lead to the question, to what extent can our environment be a constant one? The answer is that, if there is a unit of optimum size such as a room, a home, a community (up to the one of 1-kilometer radius), this can and should be constant. In this way we can face a world of changing dynamic cities by building them with constant physical units within which we can create quality—units meant for a certain purpose and containing a certain desirable mixture of residences, cultural facilities, industry, and commerce.” If you read on, it becomes only more obvious that Mr. Doxiadis is searching for some kind of immutable truth. I think that Paolo Soleri is doing roughly the same in his quest of “Areology”, and the proposed urban spaces only horrify me with their total lack of playfulness. I do not wish to be the victim of such plans

COUNTERPOINT

A courteous environment will enrich its occupants. Wealth is synonymous with access to the activities and processes that matter to you. Playfulness provides access to what was previously noise, redundancy, or garbage. Your wealth is enhanced by the opportunity to have it matter to someone else: your children, your friends, or your extended community. The “loop” way of thinking provides for recycling your own energy. It is an “ecological think.” 

So far I have been talking about the kinds of disembodied relationships that seem acceptable when one is discussing control and process and the properties of change. I do not intend to be any more specific about them because this publication is neither a catalogue nor a handbook nor a technical dictionary. If I can inspire you to dig further into the bibliography or to contact authors directly, I have been successful. I do want to mention briefly the kinds of materials that some of us suspect will be necessary for the realization of truly responsive, unprogrammed, playful environments.

I will not talk about form. That, my friend, will come about when you, the materials, the control and energy sources get together. I predict that in form and behavior the resulting structures will be described sometimes as artificial organism—and I daydream that architecture may eventuate as a technological branch of zoology!

THE STUFF OF IT

What kinds of materials and energetics will you find in a responsive, playful environment? Look around you.[7] Consider the correlations you may observe between the structure of mechanisms and the adaptability of their behaviors. Most of the man-made machines we see rely for their entelechies upon hard, rigid materials and the moving parts are guided or confined either by smooth, sliding surfaces or by rotation about shafts. The energy equations one could write for them are expressible in terms of vector forces, lengths, velocities, and other such linearly related variables with time as an explicit parameter. These are the mathematical manipulations with which we are taught to grapple in school and they are easy to transfer from one mechanism to the next both as descriptors and as design tools. We are in fact taught early that the opportunity to reduce mechanism to symbolic formulae is highly beneficial to the process of decision and design—and the habit thenceforth programs us to seek solutions by way of such mechanisms. We somehow never quite shake free of them until biological systems hit us in the face with their fascinating modes of coping in their environments.

When we start trying to imitate biology (and move into the area now called Bionics), we find it strangely difficult so long as we attempt the imitation with rigid materials: so long, for example, as we describe a man’s movements as if he were merely an animated skelton. A breakthrough into the realm of soft materials, with thermodynamic energy relationships, suddenly puts you into a position to fulfill the desired biological paradigm within the frame of ordinary, non-living materials.

To date a few of us have been working and playing with thin plastic films and foams, and with compressed air and other expandables. I am not talking simply about inflatable blisters nor even double-wall structures which generally have been patterned after their post-and-beam counterparts. Artificial organisms as living environments may be made highly permeable to their surroundings while also being courteous to their occupants. Self-organizing controllers can maintain (for example) average light levels or favorable brightness differences in the context of the weather, time of day, and the difference between your mood and that mood which was anticipated. The radiation or absorption of heat in direct exchange with the surrounding can be made relevant to your activities and to the thermodynamic conditions available. The acoustic properties of the inner spaces can be caused to enhance the privacy of a tete-a-tete or the mutual involvement in a larger gathering. Walls that move to the touch—relevant to the function of support or moving back in retreat—that change in color and form: streamlining themselves to the wind or shrinking down when unoccupied, are all possible within the state-of-the-art technology.

No architect’s prior commitments to a fixed design could possibly serve so many functions so well. Let us accede to the admission that any immutable structure is going to deprive its occupants of that which should by now be their birthright: the active use of a responsive environment as an artist with his brush so as to convey an affirmative message of their own participation.

I will grant that much use will still be made of rigid members as surfaces and exoskeletons, as articulated components, or as lively contrast in an otherwise plastic system. Let us bear in mind, however, that each use of these materials serves in some way to delimit a priori the richness of response which that part of the system could enjoy. Rigidity as protection against wind and weather simply isn’t necessary when a structure has the capability of reshaping itself actively and in a manner relevant to the maintenance of its inner integrity and intention. The wolf that came huffing and puffing to the first two little pigs would have a discouraging time of it had the straw or sticks been resilient plastic with self-organizing control systems in command. They would then laugh at the third little pig and wonder why he would want a house that was the same in summer as in winter.

A PARTING WORD OF WARNING

I come from an academic background which relies heavily for its communications about its reality upon drawings, schematics, models, verbal description, computer graphics, and other ersatz displays. When I began grappling with the complexities and responsiveness of “soft control material” (as we call it) I found that metaphors and simulation games just don’t work any more. You have to play with reality itself: life size.

Do you realize how much the means of expression and design that are available to you serve to preprogram what you create with them? Get away from your drafting tables and T-squares; throw out all that flat, stiff cardboard and balsa; destroy the squareness and flatness of the spaces you live and work in;and generally unprogram yourself from the habits of thought seemingly demanded by steel and concrete and glass. Get yourself some plastic film and an old vacuum cleaner you can run backwards, find a heat-sealer or some tape or adhesive and go at it. There really is no other way to metabolize for yourself the properties and topologies of this new world of responsive, seif-organizing, evolutionary artificial organisms. Get out there and DO IT.

Who was that wolf anyway? The bill collector? landlord? hunger? a general neurosis? Just how strong were the myths of our childhood and how much effort is entailed in throwing them off? Those who cringe in stone boxes may not yet be aware that they are already dead.

REFERENCES

Barron, R. L., “Self-Organizing and Learning Control Systems,“ in: H. L. Oestreicher and D. R.  Moore(eds.), Cybernetic Problems in Bionics, New York, Gordon and Breach, (1968).

Brodey, W. M., “The Clock Mani­festo,” Ann. N. Y. Acad. Sci. Vol. 138, (1967). 3 

— “Soft Architecture: The Design of Intelligent Environ­ments,” Landscape Vol. 7, No. 1, (Autumn 1967).

— “ If you Can’t Support the Revolution, Let the Revolu­tion Support You,” Innovation Issue No. 15, (October 1970). 

— “Information Exchange in the Time Domain,” in Gray, Duhl, and Rizzo (eds.), General Systems Theory and Psychiatry, Boston, Little Brown, (1969).

— and Lindgren, N., “Human Enhancement: Beyond the Ma­chine Age,” (two articles) IEEE Spectrum, (September 1967 and February 1968).

Gamba, A., “Optimum Perfor­mance of Learning Machines,” Proc. IRE Vol. 49, No. 1, (Jan­ uary 1961).

Gibson, J. J., The Senses Con­sidered as Perceptual Systems, Boston, Houghton Mifflin, (1966).

Hermann, H. and Kotelly, J. C., “An Approach to Formal Psychiatry,” Perspec. in Biol, and Med. Vol. 10, No. 2, (Winter 1967).

Johnson, A. R., “Organization, Perception, and Control in Living Systems,” Indus. Mngmt. Rev. (MIT) Vol. 10, No. 2, (Winter 1969).

— “Performance as Con­ troller of Performance,” Proc. 3rd Ann. Symp. Am. Soc. Cyber­netics, (October 1969). 

— “Information Systems that Managers Can Really Talk With,” Innovation Issue No. 10, (March 1970).

— “Dialogue and the Explo­ration of Context: Properties of an Adequate Interface,” Proc. 4th Ann. Symp. Am. Soc. Cyber­netics, (October 1970)(in press). 

Kilmer, W. L., McCulloch, W. S., and Blum, J., “Some Mechanisms for a Theory of the Reticular Formation,” in Mesarovic (ed.), Systems Theory and Biology, New York, Springer-Verlag, (1968). 

Pask, G., “Comments on Men, Machines, and Communication Between Them,” Vision - 67 ICCAS, New York Univ., (1967). 

Storm, H. O., “Eolithism and De­ sign,” Colorado Quarterly Vol. 1, No. 3 (Winter 1953). 

Whole Earth Catalogue, Published semi-annually by the Portola In­stitute, Menlo Park, California. 

Wiener, N., The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society, Boston, Houghton Mifflin, (1950).