Ranulph Glanville

Ranulph Glanville (13 June 1946 – 20 December 2014) was an Anglo-Irish cybernetician and design theorist. He was founding Vice-President of the American Society for Cybernetics from 2006 to 2009, and President of the American Society for Cybernetics from 2009 to 2014.

This article is about the Anglo-Irish cybernetician. For the twelfth-century Chief Justiciary of England, see Ranulf de Glanvill.

Education

Glanville studied at the Architectural Association School in London, 1964-67 and 1969-71, where he gained a diploma. In his final year, cybernetician Professor Gordon Pask arranged for him to study for a doctorate in cybernetics at Brunel University, exploring relationships between architecture and language (1975).[1] He took another PhD, also at Brunel, and also in relationships between architecture and language, in the Centre for the Study of Human Learning (1988).[2] Brunel awarded him a higher doctorate (DSc) in cybernetics and design in 2006.[3]

Work

Glanville taught at the School of Architecture, Portsmouth University (1978-96) and was later professor of research in Innovation Design Engineering at the Royal College of Art, London (2008-14), and was also a professor of research design in the Faculty of Architecture, Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium, and adjunct professor of design research at Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Australia.

Cybernetics

Glanville’s work in cybernetics covered a wide range. Special areas of interest included his “Theory of Objects” — a theory he argued second-order cybernetics cannot properly work without — and Black box theory. He developed connections between cybernetics and design, being credited by some with the creation of a new (sub-)field.

In his time as President of the American Society for Cybernetics, Glanville addressed the challenge Margaret Mead set the Society at its inaugural conference in 1967,[4] that of applying cybernetic ideas to the formation of the society itself. While the main legacy of Mead's remarks has been the development of the epistemological concerns of second-order cybernetics (the cybernetics of cybernetics) by von Foerster and others,[5][6] Glanville addressed them more directly in the innovative conversational (cybernetic) formats of the society's conferences, interpreting second order cybernetics in terms of how cybernetics may be practised cybernetically.[7]

Design

Glanville developed an understanding of the act of designing that is in contrast to the engineering approach of specifying problems to create solutions. His primary metaphor was design as a form of cybernetic conversation, which is where he located the “coin” of which he saw design and cybernetics as being opposite sides.

Selected publications

Glanville wrote more than 170 articles and papers about architecture, cybernetics and psychology.[8] A selection:

  • 1981, Why Design Research? in Jacues, R. and Powell, J. (Eds.), Design, science, method: Proceedings of the 1980 Design Research Society conference, Westbury House, Guildford, pp. 86–94, 1981.
  • 1984, "Cedric Price, Precisely" in Cedric Price: Works II, The Architectural Association, London.
  • 1995, with Gerard de Zeeuw (eds.), Problems of Values and Invariants, Amsterdam: Thesis Publishers.
  • 1999, Researching design and designing research, MIT paper
  • 2000, "Living in Lines" in R. McLeod (ed), Interior Cities, RMIT Press, Melbourne.
  • 2000, with Gerard de Zeeuw (eds), Problems of Action and Observation, BKS+, Southsea, 2000.
  • 2000, "The Value of Being Unmanageable: Variety and Creativity in CyberSpace" in H. Eichmann, J. Hochgerner, and F. Nahrada (eds), Netzwerke, Falter Verlag, Vienna.
  • 2001, with B. Scott, “About Gordon Pask”, Special double issue of Kybernetes, Gordon Pask, Remembered and Celebrated, Part I, 30, 5/6, pp. 507–508.
  • 2002, Doing the Right Thing: the Problems of… Gerard de Zeeuw, Academic Guerilla., paper 2002.
  • 2007, "Try again. Fail again. Fail better: The cybernetics in design and the design in cybernetics", Kybernetes, 36(9/10), 1173–1206. doi: 10.1108/03684920710827238
  • 2009–2014, The Black Boox (Vol. 1–3). Vienna: Edition Echoraum.

References
  1. http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/4286
  2. http://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/5018
  3. Brier, S. (2008) "Ranulph Glanville: The Cybernetician of Ignorance", Cybernetics & Human Knowing, Vol. 15, no. 1 pp. 81-89.
  4. Mead, M. (1968). The cybernetics of cybernetics. In H. von Foerster, J. D. White, L. J. Peterson & J. K. Russell (Eds.), Purposive Systems (pp. 1–11). New York, NY: Spartan Books.
  5. Glanville, R. (2002). Second order cybernetics. In F. Parra-Luna (Ed.), Systems science and cybernetics. In Encyclopaedia of life support systems (EOLSS). Oxford: EoLSS. Retrieved from http://www.eolss.net/
  6. von Foerster, H. (2003). Cybernetics of cybernetics. In Understanding understanding: Essays on cybernetics and cognition (pp. 283–286). New York, NY: Springer-Verlag. (Reprinted from: Communication and control, pp. 5–8, by K. Krippendorff, Ed., 1979, New York, NY: Gordon and Breach).
  7. Glanville, R. (2011). Introduction: A conference doing the cybernetics of cybernetics. Kybernetes, 40(7/8): 952–963. doi: 10.1108/03684921111160197. Westermann, C. (2010). Cybernetics: Art, Design, Mathematics – A Meta-Disciplinary Conversation Archived 23 October 2014 at the Wayback Machine. Leonardo Reviews Quarterly, 1(02), 24–26. Richards, L. D. (2015). Designing Academic Conferences in the Light of Second-Order Cybernetics. Constructivist Foundations, 11(1), 65–73. Sweeting, B., & Hohl, M. (2015). Exploring Alternatives to the Traditional Conference Format: Introduction to the Special Issue on Composing Conferences. Constructivist Foundations, 11(1): 1–7. Hohl, M., & Sweeting, B. (Eds.). (2015). Composing conferences. Special issue of Constructivist Foundations, 11(1). Retrieved from http://www.univie.ac.at/constructivism/journal/11/1
  8. List of Papers, publications and Writings by Ranulph Glanville.
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