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Invitation to Recursioning: Heinz von Foerster and Cybernetic Praxis

To operate with (or in, or from) the discipline of cybernetics is to engage with the concepts and guides-to-action elucidated by Heinz von Foerster. It is impossible for us to do otherwise, because his work “stands under” the praxis of circular-causal reasoning, second-order thinking-acting, and ethical viewpoints. Elucidate is a fitting word because it comes from a root meaning to shine a light, and this is what von Foerster consistently did—in his writing, his teaching and his conversations, whether in conference halls or at dining-room tables. As his spouse, Mai von Foerster, once said during dinner, “Heinz has a mind like a crystal.” To shine a light on oneself while focusing one’s own awareness is to embody his deepest gift, his reminder to observe our observing—that is, to recursively learn. Cybernetics of cybernetics, after all, was his coinage (von Foerster, 1979). As expressed and embodied by von Foerster, recursion and learning, second-order cybernetics and ethics are constant clarifiers in my daily efforts to design software applications or to support others as they steer their own design processes. Let us call this “design of design,” another apt coinage in the context of Heinz. Surely we are all better off when his insights are more widely recognized and applied, for they are too valuable not to be everywhere. Here I offer to bring his catalytic guides to light and to pay them, and him, homage, with and through further recursions.