Ranulph Glanville
It is with profound sadness that the American Society for
Cybernetics announces the untimely passing of our president,
Ranulph Glanville six months prior to his 70th birthday on June 13,
2015.
Ranulph Glanville was Professor Emeritus of Architecture and
Cybernetics at University College London, also Research Senior Tutor
and Professor in Innovation Design Engineering at Royal College of
Art in London. In addition, he was Professor of Architecture at the
University of Newcastle in Australia and Senior Professor of
Research Design at KU Leuven—LUCA in Belgium. He published in excess
of 350 academic publications. He was an architect, composer
and artist as well as a cybernetician. He rebuilt the ASC from a
struggling organization with fewer than 40 members to a thriving
intellectual conversation involving upwards of 300.
Ranulph Glanville gained a Diploma in Architecture from the
Architectural Association School, London (working in the area of
experimental electro-acoustic music). This was followed by a PhD in
Cybernetics with a thesis entitled "A Cybernetic Development of
Epistemology and Observation, Applied to objects in Space and time
(as Seen in Architecture)” which tackled the question of what
structure might sustain the belief that we all see differently, yet
believe we see the same thing. He called this his theory of
objects. His supervisor was Gordon Pask and his examiner was Heinz
von Foerster. His second PhD was in human learning and dealt
with how we understand architectural space. In 2006, he was
awarded a DSc in Cybernetics and Design by Brunel University.
Professor Glanville for many years worked as a freelance,
itinerant professor, mainly commuting between the UK, Belgium,
Hong Kong and Australia. In the UK he most recently was the research
professor in Innovation Design Engineering at the Royal College of
Art, Imperial College of Science and Technology. In Australia, he
had a major part in the Invitational Masters through Practice and
the Doctorate through Practice at RMIT University. He was emeritus
professor of architecture and cybernetics at the Bartlett,
University College London.He has written on Design Research for over
quarter of a century, early on introducing concepts such as research
as design and the importance of finding appropriate theory for
design within design, rather than unquestioningly importing theories
from other subjects.
To this end it is only right that we quote from Ranulph himself:
If you slow things down then you see nuances that you wouldn’t
normally see. That is revealing — slowness has a particular quality
of its own. It is difficult to slow things down and to
simultaneously keep alert. Being caught in between, being a bit
lost, is good for a human being. Things have their own time, and we
should learn to enjoy this, rather than imposing our own, usually
rushed time. A little slowness, living in the now, and a reduction
of the significance of the nation state might really help us.
A lot of my cybernetics is philosophical in nature, a lot of it goes
against conventional cybernetics, which is in general focused on
purposeful systems — systems with goals. I’m just as interested in
systems that don’t have goals. So I am better at keeping my eyes
open for opportunities than in taking them. If I leave myself open
to see possibilities and if I leave space for people to offer
“gifts” to me, then I often get some extraordinary opportunities
which I could never have hoped for. That’s the opposite of the
cybernetic goal-oriented system. In cybernetics, I’m interested in
the transcendental questions or frameworks within which cybernetics
happens, which we tend to assume in order to be able to act. I’m
interested in what those assumptions are: what they imply. In that
sense I’m someone who looks at the foundations and questions them —
someone interested in the relationship between “freedom” and the
“machine”. The most remarkable characteristic of human beings is
that we create patterns. Without the ability to create patterns we
wouldn’t be able to think. That’s what I do: generally at a rather
abstract level.
I’m interested in a society that minimises the impact of society and
maximises the space for the individual. I will argue against
control. Not all control, but against our assumption of the
universal possibility and desirability of control. We are aware that
our attempts to control are often inadequate. We usually excuse this
as due to exceptional circumstances, or an inadequate description
(one without enough variety) But I would like to suggest an
alternative to always making excuses. We can ask ourselves what
happens if, when there’s a serious variety imbalance, we give up
trying to control? If we don’t try to force the system we had
thought to control into having as little variety as we have? Then we
are left with a vastness of variety (and hence possibilities) that
goes way beyond our limits. We can be flooded, not by water
inundating us, but by possibilities we had never dreamt of.
He leaves his wife the Dutch physiotherapist, Aartje Hulstein, and
his son Severi. We miss him already.