FEEDFORWARD PAPER # 3 /5
The Cybernetic
Futures Framework
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FEEDFORWARD PAPER #3/5
The Cybernetic Futures Framework
AUTHORS
Thomas Biedermann Dr Jessica Herrington Prof. Andrew Meares DESIGN BY
Eden Payne PHOTOGRAPHY BY
Prof. Andrew Meares
“The future is built everyday in the present,
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and what we do today is informed by multiple histories.”
Genevieve Bell [1]
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As individuals and groups, we regularly anticipate possible futures and change our behaviour in the present. As an individual, we step aside if someone is walking straight towards us because we anticipate a collision if we don’t. An organisation scans current trends and markets, looking for signals that will allow it to anticipate potential risks or opportunities, and acts accordingly.
THE CYBERNETIC FUTURES FRAMEWORK
Individuals and organisations that have these abilities and can employ them behave as ‘anticipatory systems’: systems that can make imaginative predictions of themselves and their environment and use these predictions to control their present behavior [2].
This work of anticipation is not about predicting the future. If it were, we would see the other person walking towards us, sigh in resignation, and brace for impact. Instead, it is about individuals or organisations imagining a variety of possibilities and acting to steer towards the ones they prefer.
These iterative loops of observation, synthesis and purposeful action are fundamentally cybernetic, and ubiquitous. But how are they shaped and how do they evolve? Who’s “expected” to step aside to avoid a collision and why? Why do we sometimes just seem resigned to collision or disaster happening, even when it hasn’t happened yet? Why do we sometimes get into these awkward dances of mirrored anticipations and actions?
Doing this requires multiple abilities: the ability to sense the environment and our place in it; the ability to imagine different possibilities, their likelihood and consequences; the ability to make judgement calls and act; and, finally, the ability to do the above iteratively and with a temporality that is appropriate to the speed of events in the environment.
In Cybernetic Futures, we are particularly interested in how anticipatory systems are shaped and change over time. We seek to (re-)interpret what led to our present, what is prevalent in our imaginations of the future, what is missing, and why. We seek to build capacity to reveal the multiple histories that shape our individual and collective imaginative
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predictions and inform our actions. This applied focus follows from the orientation and commitment to enable plural perspectives and a growing capability to imagine and build futures. As futurist and artist John McHale exhorted, we need to develop social thinking, through which we may apply our developed capacities in humanely desirable terms to match the potency of our scientific and technological capabilities [3]. In this Feedforward paper, we introduce the Cybernetic Futures Framework as one tool for individuals and organisations to do this work and help think about futures as a system.
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Introducing the Cybernetic Futures Framework “The future” remains inescapably linked to pasts, presents, individuals, institutions, and geography. This raises questions about who imagines the future, how and why they do so; how are these imaginations of the future communicated; and in what ways imagination, power and action converge. Imaginaries and our perception of systems are intertwined. Our imaginaries affect how we act in the present and the infrastructures that we create, maintain or discard. In turn, the infrastructures that underpin our practices contribute to shaping our imaginaries. In this way, individuals and organisations are participants in both infrastructures and imaginaries. In a complex and increasingly transient world, imaginaries can serve as stability-making devices, both by reducing the number of choices to consider, and by creating communities and institutions that hold and legitimise these visions of the future.
THE CYBERNETIC FUTURES FRAMEWORK
The Cybernetic Futures Framework highlights the dynamic relationships that exist between our collective imaginations of the future, the infrastructures that support them, and the material agents of change that form a communication channel in-between.
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Cybernetics’ concern with understanding and steering systems comprised of people, technologies and ecologies leads to a necessary interdisciplinary practice of identifying and acting within the imaginaries and infrastructures that animate systems.
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American Futurist Alvin Toffler saw this fragmentation and pin-holing of the lifestyles and futures we engage with as a self-preservation response to an increasingly fast and connected world. By forming or joining ‘subcults’, social forms and groups that share a common view of the world, individuals and organisations make higher-level decisions to “reduce the increasing complexity of choices to manageable proportions” [4]. Repeated engagement with these simplifications can lead members of a subcult do reduce the range of factors and possibilities they consider. In doing so, these groups also reduce the range of alternative futures that they can conceptualise, assess and pursue. Cybernetics’ concern with understanding and steering systems comprised of people, technologies and ecologies leads to a necessarily interdisciplinary practice of identifying and acting within the imaginaries and infrastructures that animate systems. It requires
us to consider whether our imaginaries and infrastructures possess what psychiatrist and cybernetician W. Ross Ashby coined the ‘requisite variety’ - the required range of perspectives and capabilities - to steer the systems we live in towards safe, responsible and sustainable futures [5]. Cybernetic Futures encourages us to consider not just the possibilities that exist in our presents but also the role that past decisions and future anticipations take in shaping our actions in the present. In the following sections we characterise imaginaries and infrastructures more explicitly; trace the agents of change that serve as a communication channel in-between; and outline the benefits of building a dynamic understanding of this system via the Cybernetic Futures Framework.
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“A future imaginary: A vision of the future that is shared by a group of people and used to motivate change in the present.”
Jason Edward Lewis [6]
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Imaginaries Artist and digital media scholar Jason Edward Lewis defines a future imaginary as “a vision of the future that is shared by a group of people and used to motivate change in the present” [6]. Influenced by experiences, media, contemporary culture and technology, these imaginaries are shaped by how the group perceives the world. Imaginaries can be focused on a multiplicity of concerns: social imaginaries, geographical and spatial imaginaries, sociotechnical imaginaries and others. Different imaginaries emerge concurrently and evolve over time as they come into contact, interact, compete or merge. In this ecological and evolutionary view of imaginaries, institutions such as political parties, large corporations, community or spiritual groups, often play a critical role in nurturing what may start as the vision of an individual or small group into an established, stable and resilient imaginary.
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In her conceptualisation of sociotechnical imaginaries, sociotechnical studies scholar Sheila Jasanoff highlights three dimensions of imaginaries as being: “collectively held, institutionally stabilized and publicly performed visions of desirable futures” [7]. The individual or emergent imaginations of the future that gain traction - through coalition building, the exercise of power, or institutionalisation establish themselves as powerful imaginaries. This dynamic view illuminates the role of institutions, and more broadly ‘infrastructures’ in selecting which visions of the future emerge from, embed and maintain themselves into the fabric of our societies.
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Infrastructures Here we draw from the ethnographical work of American sociologist Susan Leigh Star, who conceptualises infrastructures as fundamentally relational and connected with organised practices. Infrastructures include but are also more than the physical layers we typically think of, such as roads, power lines and water pipes. In the complex systems that cybernetics is concerned with, infrastructure takes on a broader nature, which Star articulates through nine common dimensions including embeddedness in other structures; having reach or scope that can transcend boundaries; and as objects of learning to become and remain part of a community of practice [8]. Seen in this light, the infrastructures involved in futures thinking encompass a range of foundational elements such as laws, policies, ways of working, disciplinary or cultural frameworks. These infrastructures both enable and constrain action and imagination.
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By providing frameworks, guidelines and enabling constraints, infrastructures enable coordinated, effective action. Acting as foundational layers and ubiquitous, transparent elements, infrastructures can also become what American cybernetician Michael Lissack calls “uncritically examined presuppositions” - the unquestioned assumptions, often implicit, that shape a practice [9]. In doing so, infrastructures become part of the shared repertoire of this practice. This shared repertoire, along with mutual engagement and the pursuit of a joint enterprise, are the main characteristics of what Swiss educational theorist and practitioner Étienne Wenger defined as a ‘community of practice’ [10]. Infrastructures are therefore inherently deployed, maintained and adapted by groups of people animated by a purpose whose accomplishment forms part of their vision of a preferred future.
THE CYBERNETIC FUTURES FRAMEWORK
In this light, the role of imaginaries in shaping infrastructures becomes apparent. Our collectively held imaginations of what the future could and should be like, motivates and shapes the infrastructures we build, maintain, adapt or discard. As outlined in the second Feedforward paper, thinking about futures as systems requires understanding the dialectical relationship between imaginaries and infrastructures, including the communication channels through which this relationship operates. As both imaginaries and infrastructures tend to be somewhat diffuse, unexamined or ‘transparent’, we turn to more concrete forms of communication to illuminate and understand the system of interest. Imaginaries, as a collective form of imagination, need both social scale and material forms to affect
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Agents of Change infrastructures. Likewise, infrastructures shape our imaginaries through a range of intermediary material objects and ideas. In the Cybernetic Futures Framework, we call these intermediaries ‘agents of change’, and pay attention to the feedback loops that connect them to each other, and to imaginaries and infrastructures. Drawing again from the work of John McHale [3], we identify and group agents of change into three categories:
Ideas & Attitudes Artefacts & Events Techniques & Methods
While it is not possible or indeed desirable to establish a rigid mapping of how these agents of change constitute a communication channel between imaginaries and infrastructures, it is however useful to interrogate their relationships. Ideas and attitudes connect most closely to the notion of imaginaries, being in the realm of thought and imagination. Conversely, techniques and methods sit closest to the notion of infrastructures, as they are typically developed, codified and constrained by specific practices. Artefacts and events sit roughly in the middle, being the more typical example output of what Wenger calls processes of ‘reification’ in communities of practice: the “process of giving form to our experience by producing objects that congeal our experience into ‘thinginess’” [10]. The material culture that a community produces can therefore be a sharp indicator of its imaginaries
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and infrastructures. Artefacts serve as an expression of those more diffuse elements, as American essayist Waldo Emerson noted: “Every nation and every man instantly surround themselves with a material apparatus which exactly corresponds to […] their state of thought” [11]. Material artefacts are also both products of, and shapers of, what American author Bruce Sterling coined a culture’s metahistory, which “helps it determine whether new things are appropriate, whether they fit into the trajectory that is considered the right track” [12]. Artefacts that are or become accepted reproduce, often with subtle variations, the metahistory of the culture they become embedded in. Denise Hearn, an American author and applied researcher, provides one example of the relationships between imaginaries, agents of change and infrastructures [13]. She connects the dominant ideas of an economic period (imaginaries) to the evolving skylines of cities (artefactual
THE CYBERNETIC FUTURES FRAMEWORK
agents of change). She traces the evolution of the skyline of London, in which religious, then judicial and legislative, and more recently financial and office towers dominate, and connects this architectural evolution with the changing paradigms in society. She concludes [13]: These stories, these paradigms, and notions of who we are as a species […] become embodied in the physical substrate of our world — they become institutionalised: through technologies, administrative processes and bureaucracy, case law, regulatory and policy documents and approaches. They ossify through feedback loops inherent to our systems. Closing this loop, from infrastructures back to imaginaries, is Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Winston Churchill’s famous quote regarding the reconstruction of the Commons Chamber during World War II: “We shape our
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buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us” [14] . Churchill argued at the time that the shape of the Commons Chamber was responsible for the two-party system (both infrastructures) that is the essence of British parliamentary democracy. In this light, the identical reconstruction of the Commons Chamber constituted what Jasanoff would call this an act of institutional stabilisation a future imaginary that includes the British parliamentary democracy. In our contemporary times, the Australian twoparty political system, modelled on the Westminster democracy as described by Churchill, is undergoing a profound fragmentation and reorganisation. This infrastructural shift is reshaping the political imaginary, enabled by, and made tangible through, the agents of change.
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Exploring pasts to chart futures Where imaginaries and infrastructures can be elusive due to their tacit and shifting nature, agents of change are typically more concrete and visible. We can identify, analyse and trace the evolutions of agents of change and, through that work, illuminate and better understand the imaginaries and infrastructures at play. This dynamic exemplifies considering the future as a system. The Cybernetic Futures Framework provides an organising principle to carry out this work. Using the framework relies on establishing agreed yet flexible boundaries for the system we are interested in, then on identifying the agents of change involved in the system and their relationships. Media articles, internal reports, strategic visions, fiction, and other sources and mediums, such as advertising, cinema, images, and conferences - both historical and contemporary, both local and foreign are key places to look for the agents of change that are at play in the system and feed this critical analysis. Looking back on the historical record and outside
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of our local context is a challenging but necessary research task. Comparing our ‘here and now’ with a different ‘there and then’ helps us bring into light the imaginary in which we currently operate and critically analyse it [7]. The mapping of system boundaries, the selection of relevant agents of change and major relationships connecting them, and the ‘read’ of the co-evolving imaginaries and infrastructures are likely to be contentious when a variety of perspectives are brough to bear. The friction borne of these varied points of view coming into contact is a part of the complexity of the system, including our subjective orientations to the futures coming into view. Navigating this friction to generate productive discomfort between different perspectives is a critical skill for the 21st century [15]. As part of our transdisciplinary work, we draw on and synthesise from fields such as creative practice [16], simulation/serious gaming [17] and systemic intervention [18] to develop and field-test methods for convening conversations that invite and
hold multiple perspectives, enable creative exploration, and hopeful action in the face of uncertainty and complexity. This transdisciplinary “hindsight operation on the past” greatly benefits from being methodical. John McHale argued that reselecting and rearranging impressions of the past can bring about new insights in the present that alter both our pasts and our futures [3]: Any serious study of the future implies an equally rigorous hindsight operation of the past. Rather than approach this in terms of traditional historical modes we need to review the past as a vast collection of incompletely recorded social and cultural experiments conducted under many different degrees of local controls and environmental determinants. The records of that past are our experimental data for charting the future. In the Feedforward paper four, we will introduce the Cybernetic Futures Compass: a complementary research tool to support practitioners in doing the necessary research.
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THE CYBERNETIC FUTURES FRAMEWORK
Conclusion In this Feedforward paper, we have established and organised the elements and relationships that Cybernetic Futures is attentive to: the dialectical relationship between imaginaries and infrastructures which we can illuminate and trace by the study of a variety of agents of change. By analysing these elements, we can start to understand the anticipatory systems that imagine and act in the present to pursue diverse futures. Beyond analysis and critique, we offer the Cybernetic Futures Framework as an invitation to identify and seize opportunities for broader, strength-based participation into these futures-building systems. It is our view that the analysis enabled by the Cybernetic Futures Framework can and should be leveraged to enable both feedback (corrective steering) and feedforward (pre-emptive steering) based on embracing uncertainty, inviting a broader range of perspectives, and taking hopeful, iterative action.
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Comparing our ‘here and now’ with a different ‘there and then’ helps us bring into light the imaginary in which we currently operate and critically analyse it.
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CASE STUDY
CyberNations In 2024, the ANU School of Cybernetics initiated the development of CyberNations, an experiential introduction to cybernetic futures in a ‘serious’ board game format. Serious games are an established approach to support learning [19]; model [20] and critique systems [21]; and facilitate the expression [22] and integration [17] of variety in complex contexts. CyberNations highlights the dialectical relationship imaginaries and infrastructures by putting players in the role of leaders taking stewardship of a community and its environment. The game is set in a persistent world, where each session starts where the previous one ended. At the start of a new session, a randomly drawn card sets the vision that community seeks to achieve, modelling its imaginary. The players’ response to this imaginary changes the state of the simulated world, from the players’ inital selection of a role to play,
to the decisions they make throughout the session. In-game effects and players’ decisions do, in turn, challenge, reinforce or modify the imaginary in play. Throughout a session, players are challenged to achieve and maintain requisite variety to effectively regulate the simulated world as a system [5]. Their capacity to do so is modulated by their ability to read the feedback loops built within the game; balance individual and group priorities across multiple time horizons; coordinate their actions; and finally shape the behaviour of the system over time. Through an engaging gameful format, CyberNations invites audiences aged 13-years and up to develop a shared experience base and vocabulary related to leading with hope and responsibility in complexity.
THE CYBERNETIC FUTURES FRAMEWORK
What comes next? While the Cybernetic Futures Framework can be applied on its own, when combined with the Cybernetic Futures Compass, it can reveal iterative insights in unexpected ways (See: Feedforward paper four). Together they offer a rich, questioning and contextualising research environment that welcomes a plurality of curiosity and boldly asks “what if?”
We believe the future is an invitation, so please join us. Sign up at cybernetics.anu.edu.au for updates from the ANU School of Cybernetics.
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REFERENCES
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2.
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Star, S.L. (1999). The Ethnography of Infrastructure. American Behavioral Scientist, 43(3), 377–391.
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Herrington, J.C., Biedermann, T.A.J., & Swift, B. (2025). Emerging Paradigms in Human-AI Creativity: From Visualisation to Biofeedback in Adaptive Interfaces, In V. Geroimenko (Ed.) Human-Computer Creativity: Generative AI in Education, Art, and Healthcare. Switzerland: Springer. (pp. 31–48).
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Inayatullah, S. (2017). Gaming, ways of knowing, and futures. Journal of Futures Studies 22(2), 101–106.
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We believe the future is an invitation, so please join us. cybernetics.anu.edu.au @anucybernetics