Participants’ questions in the last facilitated session

In the last conference session, Ranulph Glanville invited each of the C:ADM2010 participants to find one question, to write it down and to read it to all other participants. The following list is the result as far as it could be collected. Most question authors added their names to their question, some did not.

Ranulph Glanville facilitating the closing session

Conference participants formulating questions

r1 pe1 s1 ???? When art is a vehicle to make “visible” the invisible, how can adaptive properties be integrated, either as a means or an end in itself?

????: How can a cybernetic approach help us to build systems that can judge the quality of music, art or aesthetics in general?

????: How can we act yet let the unnamed be?

????: Is learning a necessary part of adaptation or can adaptation occur inspite of it? If the former, what are the characteristics of such learning? If the latter, how do we observe it?

Gary Boyd: How can I with you, and you, and you, too, make and send out, and on and on, wonderful, evolving, curious, hope-helping cybersystemic tools?

Craig Bremner: I wonder what Maisie knew? Then I wonder why I want to know?

Jocelyn Chapman: How can cybernetics of cybernetics steer the practice/design/art/architecture that is our everyday living?

Hsiao-Ling Chung 1: Will cybernetics be a feasible approach to look at/understand what I want to look at?

Hsiao-Ling Chung 2: Will I be able to justify the application of cybernetics to the network phenomenon of the hybrid creative sector?

Hsiao-Ling Chung 3: Will I be able to convince others of the beauty and value of cybernetics?

Daniel M. Cohen: If a common language or an easily facilitated dialogue is a necessity for inter-, trans- or meta-disciplinary conversation… Then what can I do to build this language or facilitate that dialogue?

Art Collings: In addition to the usual “political” means for a single person to act within a group process (assuming an emergent, non-facilitated group), what other interesting ways are there to act to affect these dynamics?

Laura Ehmann: How can cybernetics of cybernetics steer the practice/design/art/architecture that is our everyday living?

Thomas Fischer: Is there a way not to learn from this conference, so that maybe we can do something like this again?

Stephen Gage: Is mining the past an old man’s prerogative or should it be left to the young?

Burl Grey 1: This experience has reinforced my suspicion that an almost universal impulse resides in the heart of humans to help others live well.

Burl Grey 2: The problem is that different conceptions are so strongly held as truth of sacred that conflict consumes too much of mostly everything.

Burl Grey 3: My intellectual community aims toward responsibility which, in principle, may offer a way for a new enlightenment.

Burl Grey 4: I call my view radical constructivism, which holds me responsible for everything. Aphorism–take more responsibility.

Phillip Guddemi: How can we nurture the spontaneous dynamics of communication among people (and not only people) so as to allow new answers, and new questions, to arise out of the resonances which emerge? (I am most certainly not talking about creating processes, but about nurturing/observing them, and I am talking about bottom-up processes, not top-down ones.)

Vijak Haddadi: How can I better integrate my theory and praxis?

Arnaud Hendrickx: If trans-disciplinary collaboration leads to a  new language shared between the participants, how can this, maybe tacit, language be externalised towards others?

Christiane Herr: How can I exchange/write about my experiences and create resonance in readers/listeners without resorting to explanation?

Aartje Hulstein: How can I become more aware of and make visible to others the practice between the actual and abstract theory?

Dirk Huylebrouck: When will the Riemann hypothesis be solved? Will it ever be? (= question by David Hilbert)

Ray Ison: Having first honoured difference, in which one’s traditions of understanding are valued, is the next enterprise to (re-)establish and (re-)articulate what we, who are in a cyber-systemic conversation, have in common in the context of contemporary circumstances?

Slavik Jablan: Can we survive without patterns?

Tim Jachna: How can I know what I should leave out?

Elys John: What does it mean to be (me), to remain a mono-disciplinarian? In a world where developments are made through collective action, should I shift and participate, or should I continue as I am?

Stephen Jones: How do we communicate basic insights of cybernetics and systems so that it becomes the tacit understanding for all public decision making to start from? We must take into account the consequences of our actions sufficiently quickly enough to present catastrophic or runaway oscillation in the system.

Faisal Kadri: I realized that I am doing core (proto) cybernetics. How can I relate my work to the rest in the field?

Jennifer Kanary: Why is conversation… What is conversation without linguistic languages? How might we design alternative ways to converse?

Jay Kapraff 1: Can we find a series of metaphors form the arts, music, painting, design, dance that help to make the abstractions form mathematics, cybernetics and philosophy concrete and operational. Can this enter the classroom?

Jay Kapraff 2: How can we facilitate more loosely structured discussions between intelligent people who speak in different tongues?

Graziele Lautenschlager: I learned from the conference multiple aspects of conversation in practice: respect and integrate others, listening, 1 + 1 can be 3, and so on… How can I exercise this understanding in my actions?

Lev Ledit: I understand that a question is a valuable thing, it wants me to react. In the end this action is the valuable outcome. BUT a question is also a dangerous thing: it is hard to question a question and thus leads to passivity. (I believe that after a question there has to be an outcome different to a question which can be questioned again. A question is not everything.) My outcome is, that I look forward to working on my new project with a highly enriched brain.

Allenna Leonard: How can the capacity for self-organisation be fostered to encourage and reward hybrid communities of practice?–And what can I do to advance this?

Judy Lombardi: When does the power of the respondent, the power of images, and the responsibility of a designer generate a triadic relationship?

Robert Martin 1: As an experiment, can we find ways of talking that avoid reifying processes into abstract nouns and avoid unifying language to maintain the mind/body duality? I believe this is desirable because it would take us to a more precise and more simple way of speaking and understanding.

Robert Martin 2: How can I use cybernetics and how can I collaborate with colleagues to create new music and interdisciplinary work?

Elizabeth McGregor 1: How can we apply the ideas of cybernetics to user interface design, effectively?

Elizabeth McGregor 2: How do we design adaptive systems that have continuity?

Elizabeth McGregor 3: Different cultures have different ways of looking at time and more specifically the past, present and future. It appears that these views points have a profound effect on how we look at important issues such as climate change, health etc. Is this true and, if so, how can we use this information to make a different?

Elizabeth McGregor 4: Many forms influence the way that we learn. How can we best transfer this information to others? (i.e., cybernetic concepts.)

Niculae Mihaita: Is cybernetics an art to understand the miracles of life, or a philosophy to control ourselves in how we learn to live together; or both, and even more?

Albert Mueller: Being asked, what main question rises during this conference, the answer is: why not more often?

Lance Nizami: Is cybernetics the interdisciplinary discipline (i.e., is all “science of relationships” either cybernetics of stamp-collection)? (Reference to Rutherford: “All Science is either physics or stamp-collecting.”)

Doug van Nort 1: What is the (co-called) “third order cybernetics, how does it relate to the “virtual”, and why did I hear neither at this conference?

Doug van Nort 2: How can cybernetics articulate/express the importance of listening? The process of listening?

Doug van Nort 3: Ways one productively disrupt such a process without wors?

Doug van Nort 4: Can we systematize anything in thought b/t people w/o all this humanness getting in the way?

Doug van Nort 5: When will we get back to music and dance as (primary) communication as it should be?

Lynne Oddo: What is the relationship of the self to the perception of one’s self? (Could that be the same?). And, how does it work (or not) with the conditions around us?

Paul Pangaro: When ought …KNOWING supersede ACTING? …ACTING supersede SENSING? …ABSTRACTION supersede ACTUALITIES? …UTILITY supersede AESTHETICS? …EXISTING LANGUAGE supersede NEW LANGUAGE? …”I” supersede “WE”? [I believe the answer to be the same in all cases. In the answer lies responsibility.]

Sylvia Rabeler: I am asking how to communicate the grandeur of a thing (such as colour/music, etc.) while using the precision of formal abstract language (that is, symbols)?

Diana Reed 1: What makes a conversation begin to “click” and flow naturally–or bump along awkwardly?

Diana Reed 2: How do systems that are separate move into some degree of coupling or sync. What inspires the connection or inhibits it?

Gernot Reither: How can cybernetic principles be used in the design of adaptive systems in architecture?

Larry Richards: What new strategies can I employ to resist becoming a cynic?

Alec Robertson: How can “designing” contribute to the discipline of cybernetics and cybernetics to the discipline of designing for creating new aesthetic social networks of value, on a micro and macro scale?

Janet Singer: What are the implications of “acting so as to provide a good past for the future” for “the design turn”, and vice versa?

Leonie Solomons: How to converse as participants of a group to explore our understandings/tensions/conflicts/differences without it (the group) dying before it has achieved its purpose, whilst recognising that purpose needs to be adaptive?

Ben Sweeting: What does it mean to establish commonality (sympathy, togetherness) amongst disparate individuals/groups.disciplines? This seems different from (and is not predicted on) reaching intellectual agreement–it is more about how we interact with each other? What, practically can we do to encourage commonality?

Stuart Umpleby: Can a theory of design encompass not only the design of buildings but also the design of scientific theories/legislation/societies?

Claudia Westerman: How do we negociate emotional comfort. And, do I wont to know the answer?

Stefan Wiltschnig: If we assume that the next things come out of the conversational fields between, from and over, and if I apply Heinz von Foerster’s “operator”, how can

Joanna Wlaszyn: From question to question… How many questions until we are able to answer them? From question to question… when do we finally think about how to answer… From question to question… How many questions need we ask to finally be able to think about how to answer?

Willie Yee: How can I maintain and extend, in my own life, cybernetic ways of thinking every day?