Ben SweetingUniversity of Brighton · School of Architecture and Design
Ben Sweeting
Doctor of Philosophy
About
42
Publications
18,042
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198
Citations
Citations since 2017
Introduction
Ben's work is situated in the fields of cybernetics, systemic design, and architectural theory, with focuses including relations between design, ethics, place, methodology, technology, and education.
Additional affiliations
January 2009 - August 2022
October 2006 - May 2007
Publications
Publications (42)
This essay uses the work of Norwegian architectural historian Christian Norberg-Schulz to explore how the issue of place may be understood in systemic and constructivist terms. While Norberg-Schulz is known for introducing Heidegger's phenomenology into architectural discourse, he also draws on Jean Piaget whose ideas are influential in cybernetics...
Heinz von Foerster's influential distinction between decidable and undecidable decisions may be taken to imply an ethics that is personal and pluralistic, summed up in invocations to decide the undecidable and to act in ways that increase the number of choices. While this approach is helpful as a critique of moralism and objectivity, it is of limit...
Cybernetics is often abstract in character, seeking to understand principles that apply in many situations. This abstraction affords cybernetics its extraordinarily broad scope, explanatory power, and transgressive quality, with ideas able to move between contexts. However, this abstraction also brings limitations, focusing attention on explaining...
This research note describes recent developments in the discourse of cybernetics, which have looked to interrogate cybernetics' limitations and legacies while also exploring the potential of cybernetic modes of thinking and acting as forms of critique.
In architectural design, sustainability is primarily thought of as a technical discourse concerned with mitigating the harm that the construction and use of buildings cause to their environment-minimising the energy that buildings consume, the waste they produce, and the habitats they destroy. While there is an urgent need to reduce (and, when poss...
This short text is a reflection on my experience working with my doctoral supervisor, the cybernetician Ranulph Glanville. It appears in the context of a book on Glanville's life and work compiled and edited by Bill Seaman.
In this article Jon Goodbun and Ben Sweeting engage in a conversation about design and its complex relation to communication. They look at the role of dialogue, the dialogical (signifying signs), and the limitations of the dialogical as one considers contemporary processes of cybernetisation and how “asignifying signs” are produced and exchanged wi...
In this talk I explore the work of British cybernetician Gordon Pask through his participation in and influence on architectural projects during the 1960s and 1970s. Pask's approach offers a paradigm for an intelligent environment that not only adapts to its use but also actively puts this use in question, requiring new actions from its users. This...
This special issue of FormAkademisk comprises a selection of articles developed from presentations at the seventh Relating Systems Thinking and Design (RSD7) symposium, held at Politecnico di Torino, Turin, October 23-26, 2018 (Barbero, 2018). RSD7 saw the launch of the Systemic Design Association (SDA), a membership organisation for the expanding...
This special issue of FormAkademisk comprises a selection of articles developed from presentations at the seventh Relating Systems Thinking and Design (RSD7) symposium, held at Politecnico di Torino, Turin, 23th-26th October 2018 (Barbero, 2018). A second collection from RSD7 is also planned to be published in FormAkademisk during 2020, continuing...
In systemic design, agreements over how to resolve wicked problems may be quickly outdated by changing circumstances and unforeseen consequences. One approach is thus to design systems that can adapt or be adapted to the circumstances they find themselves in. Adaptability may, however, act conservatively, making outdated resolutions more resilient...
In this chapter I review the intimate relationship between cybernetics and design, drawing on the work of Ranulph Glanville and Gordon Pask. The significance of each of these fields for the other follows from the mutualism between them, such that cybernetics can be understood in terms of design as well as vice versa. The full value of this can be s...
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to put forward a way that ethics may be applied recursively to itself, in the sense that how we speak and reason about ethics is an activity to which ethical considerations and questions apply.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper is built on parallels between design and cybernetics, integrating elements of...
While the relationship between ethics and design is usually thought of in terms of the application of the former to the latter, it is not as if ethics is a settled body of theory that can authoritatively guide design practice. Depending on which theories or ideas we refer to, we receive different guidance as to what to do. Indeed, design may have a...
Place-what it means to be somewhere, or to be from somewhere-is a common thread running through the many systemic crises of our time. Place is a value under threat from globalisation, gentrification, networked technologies, human conflict and environmental disasters. At the same time, it is an underlying cause of some of the political and social te...
Open peer commentary on the article “Heterarchical Reflexive Conversational Teaching and Learning as a Vehicle for Ethical Engineering Curriculum Design” by Philip Baron. Upshot: Baron locates the decolonisation of the curriculum within the classroom, repurposing radically constructivist approaches to teaching and learning and giving them a sense o...
While Tom Scholte has concentrated on ways in which cybernetics can inform theatre, the connections that he has developed between the two fields are significant for being not ones of application but, rather, overlap, where cybernetic processes are seen to be being enacted within an already established set of practices. Scholte's bridge building is,...
I wish to thank all commentators for their stimulating contributions. The first thing to note in response to these seven commentaries is the range of ground they cover, indicating the wide potential of the relation between cybernetics and design research to inform both fields. It is significant that many of the aspects raised by commenters are focu...
In this paper I speak directly to the subject matter of this conference: to its theme of flourishing, and
to the subject areas of systems thinking and design that this conference series as a whole seeks to
bring together.
The conference theme of flourishing is a direct reference to ethics, and in particular the
Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle. The...
The annual American Society for Cybernetics (ASC) conference took place on 1-5 June 2016 in Olympia, WA, and was hosted by Evergreen State College. The proceedings from this conference are presented in this volume of Kybernetes, continuing a tradition that has seen this journal publish the proceedings of recent ASC conferences in Troy, NY (Glanvill...
In designing architecture we put forward ways in which to live, enabling particular patterns of living while limiting other possibilities. In this sense architecture has a normative function and can be compared to the way that ethical theories and moral codes purport to guide us on how to live. Given this, I suggest that ethical reflection about ho...
Context • The relationship between design and science has shifted over recent decades. One bridge between the two is cybernetics, which offers perspectives on both in terms of their practice. From around 1980 onwards, drawing on ideas from cybernetics, Glanville has suggested that rather than apply science to design, it makes more sense to understa...
Open peer commentary on the article ““Black Box” Theatre: Second-Order Cybernetics and Naturalism in Rehearsal and Performance” by Tom Scholte.
The parallels that Scholte has drawn between cybernetics and theatre open up a new avenue for exploring cybernetic ideas. This complements the way that cybernetics has invoked design as a way of questionin...
Upshot: I reinforce the idea of broad connections between cybernetics, design and science that become apparent when the messy processes implicit in each are reflected on more explicitly. In so doing, I treat design not as a field in which cybernetic ideas are to be applied, but one in which they are reflected on and pursued.
Context : The design of academic conferences, in which settings ideas are shared and created, is, we suggest, of more than passing interest in constructivism, where epistemology is considered in terms of knowing rather than knowledge. Problem: The passivity and predominantly one-way structure of the typical paper presentation format of academic con...
On the 3rd of August 2014, the American Society for Cybernetics (ASC) celebrated their 50th anniversary at their annual conference, which that year was held in Washington, DC, hosted by George Washington University. The choice of venue reflected the fact that the first conference of the ASC was held in the same city in 1964. The proceedings from th...
Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to explore ways in which cybernetics leads to distinctive ways of acting.
Design/methodology/approach - Paralleling von Foerster’s argument that it makes more sense to speak of the cybernetics of epistemology than the epistemology of cybernetics, the author argues that cybernetics is not one form of practice...
The relationship between ethics and design is most usually thought of in terms of applied ethics. There are, however, difficulties with this: for instance, conventional ethical stances such as deontology or consequentialism depend on procedures (predefined rules, optimisation) that are inapplicable in the sorts of complex situations which designers...
Since around 1980, Ranulph Glanville has put forward the idea that rather than seeing research in design as one form of science, we instead see scientific research as a specific form of design. This argument, based on the way that scientific research inevitably involves design activity but not vice versa, and others like it around that time consoli...
One of the major themes of Ranulph Glanville's work has been the intimate connection between cybernetics and design, the two principle disciplines that he has worked in and contributed to. In this paper I review the significance of the analogy that he proposes between the two and its connection to his concerns with, firstly, the cybernetic practice...
In this thesis I have explored some of the ways in which the contexts of epistemology, ethics and designing architecture are each concerned with undecidable questions (that is, with those questions that have no right answers). Drawing on design research, second‐order cybernetics and radical constructivism, I have understood this undecidability to f...
Open peer commentary on the article “Radical Constructivist Structural Design Education for Large Cohorts of Chinese Learners” by Christiane M. Herr.
Herr’s radically constructivist approach to the technological aspects of architectural education also invites a critical review of the constructivist credentials of the conversational model of design...
This paper explores a potential relation between architecture and ethics intrinsic to design processes when understood in terms of dialogue or conversation. We draw on separate but related research interests: one focused on the design process, especially the significance of drawing, and the other on the ethics of designing for the public realm, wit...
What Heidegger means by ‘dwelling’ in his lecture 'Building Dwelling Thinking' is closely linked to one of his most difficult to interpret ideas – that of 'the fourfold', or das Geviert, comprising ‘earth’, ‘sky’, ‘mortals’ and ‘gods'. But perhaps one of the most peculiar characteristics of an already peculiar concept is that, while the fourfold re...
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to describe the various movements from abstraction to actuality in the context of design, with particular reference to architecture, first in terms of the design process and second in terms of the interpretation of architecture by observers.
Design/methodology/approach
The paper focuses on the designers' use of...
This paper will reflect on a particular design project in order to discuss different aspects of communication in designing architecture: firstly the conversational structure of designing and secondly the difficulty of communicating through architecture given that meaning is always constructed individually.
During the second half of the fifth century and the first of the sixth the divided city of Ravenna and its mosaic programmes embodied the political, racial and doctrinal divisions of the Roman world itself. This dissertation will study the intricate political and theological situation in Ravenna by examining all three communities through their vari...
Projects
Projects (3)
The two special issues of FormAkademisk comprise a selection of articles developed from presentations at the seventh Relating Systems Thinking and Design (RSD7) Symposium, held at Politecnico di Torino, Turin, 23th-26th October 2018 (Barbero, 2018). The first edition was released in the January 2020 and the second is planned to be released in autumn 2020.
Speaking and reasoning about ethics, however we go about it, is an activity that we do and so something to which ethical considerations can be applied. It is rare for this to be done as many forays into ethical discourse are made on the basis that they offer guidance as to the good, with the result that questions about the way such guidance is debated or communicated is obscured. I am attempting to open up such a topic through reference to (1) cybernetics (a field which is concerned with recursive forms such as this, such as in the work of Heinz von Foerster whose remarks on ethics I understand in these terms) and (2) designing architecture (if we think of architecture as being like ethics in that it is normative, putting forward ways in which we are to live, then ethical questions regarding how we design architecture prompt consideration of similar questions regarding how we develop and set out ethical theories, moral codes and the like).
