Larry Richards (conference co-chair, local organizer)
Larry Richards is a long-time member of American Society for Cybernetics and attendee at its conferences. He served for nine years (1983-1991) as Treasurer, President and Past President of ASC, and received its Norbert Wiener Medal in 2006. He is also a past President and Fellow of the American Society for Engineering Management. Larry currently serves as Executive Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs and Professor of Management and Informatics at Indiana University East, one of the eight campuses of Indiana University. His books include “Constraint Theory” and “Craft and Constraint, Clocks and Conversation” (a web book available here).
Ranulph Glanville (conference co-chair, ASC President)
Current President of the American Society for Cybernetics, Ranulph Glanville is an Anglo-Irish professor in 4 universities in 3 continents, and has 3 doctorates: a PhD in cybernetics; a second PhD in human learning; and a DSc in cybernetics and design. He teaches architecture, design, cybernetics and research, and is an active researcher in all four fields. His original education was as an architect, but he spent most of his time as a student making avant garde music and developing live electronic performance. He is still involved in music, and other art practices. He edits and writes for academic journals, including a column for the journal Cybernetics and Human Knowing. His collected columns have just been published as volume 3, “39 Steps“, of his collected works (“The Black Boox”), by edition echoraum in Vienna. He is married to the physiotherapist Aartje Hulstein, and his son Severi works with video. Perhaps his most peculiar achievement was to learn Finnish, an then argue a connection between the construction of Finnish language and its architecture.
Christiane M. Herr (ASC Vice President, electronic publishing)
Christiane M. Herr, the current Vice President for Electronic Publications of the American Society for Cybernetics is an architect, researcher and teacher focusing on the areas of digitally supported designing, conceptual design, design studio teaching and traditional Chinese approaches to creative thinking. After working and studying in Germany, Australia, Hong Kong and China, she is currently teaching architecture at NCKU in Taiwan. In her PhD work, Christiane has explored cellular automata as a means to establish architectural design support, which led to her strong interest in diagrams and designerly ways of seeing. Based on this interest, she became fascinated with constructivist ideas and ways of describing how design processes can be thought of as conversations.
Thomas Fischer (conference webmaster, ASC Secretary)
Thomas Fischer, the current Secretary of the American Society for Cybernetics, comes originally from Germany. For over 10 years he and his family lived in Hong Kong where he worked as an Assistant Professor in Product and Industrial Design at the School of Design at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Thomas worked as a Visiting Associate Professor at the Institute of Creative Industries Design at National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan from early 2010 to mid-2011. Thomas is currently an Associate Professor at the Department of Architecture at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University in Suzhou, China. Thomas holds a PhD in Education from the University of Kassel in Germany and one in Architecture and Design from RMIT University in Australia. Thomas is as much interested in human creativity as he is in machine logic and he studies both, preferably in some combination. Much of his work is situated in, and dedicated to design education, creativity in Eastern and Western culture, the limitations of methods and tools in designing and the theory and philosophy of computer-aided architectural design. Thomas is a member of the American Society for Cybernetics (ASC) and serves on its executive board.
