Cybernetics and the constructed environment : design between nature and technology / Zihao Zhang.

A transformation formula -- The technology-nature edge : from pastoralism to anthropocene -- The human-technology edge : from ready-made artefacts to dematerialized humans -- The human-nature edge : the three waves of "nature study" -- Posthumanism, co-production, and assemblage -- Searching for nonhuman agency -- From nonhuman agency to speculative ontology -- Coproductive ntelligence -- Cybernetics and landscape : from uncertainty to opportunity -- Reframing cybernetics -- Sensing as coding : the episteme of the digital age -- The rise of intelligent agents : a non-model-centric paradigm -- Actuating leads to attuning : cultivated wildness -- Cultivated wildness and speculative ecology.

"Grounded in contemporary landscape architecture theory and practice, Cybernetics and the Constructed Environment blends examples from art, design, and engineering with concepts from cybernetics and posthumanism, offering a transdisciplinary examination of the ramifications of cybernetics on the constructed environment. Cybernetics, or the study of communication and control in animals and machines, has grown increasingly relevant nearly 80 years after its inception. Cyber-physical systems, sensing networks, and spatial computing-algorithms and intelligent machines create endless feedback loops with human and non-humean actors, co-producing a cybernetic environment. Yet, when an ecosystem is meticulously managed by intelligent machines, can we still call it wild nature? Posthumanism ideas, such as new materialism, actor-network theory, and object-oriented ontology, have become increasingly popular among design disciplines, including landscape architecture, and may have provided transformative frameworks to understand this entangled reality. However, design still entails a sense of intentionality and an urge to control. How do we, then, address the tension between the designer's intentionality and the co-produced reality of more-than-human agents in the cybernetic environment? Is posthumanism enough to develop a framework to think beyond our all-too-human ways of thinking?"-- Provided by publisher.