CYBERNETIC SERENDIPITY AT THE FT
The science of cybernetics captured the attention of some of the sharpest minds in the USA and the UK from the 1940s onwards. For Terry Trickett, as an architect and designer, cybernetics played a key part in solving the 'exceedingly complex' problems associated with the way large companies occupy space. At the time, in the 1970s, when he was faced by the formidable task of guiding the Financial Times into an unknown future, he found himself straddling the worlds of cybernetics and design. Terry Trickett has now revisited this long-ago experience in “A Cybernetic Clarion Call to the Arts’ Community”, a presentation /performance given at EVA London in 2019. Below, in an extract from the published paper, he recalls how, at the Financial Times, he applied cybernetic processes of control and information feedback to meet the challenges posed by a much-feared technological revolution.
In the late 1970s, the directors of the Financial Times (FT) asked me to undertake a comprehensive study of the whole organisation so that the environmental and space implications of introducing new technology could be assessed. At that time, the intention was that the FT would lead the way in Fleet Street in emulating papers such as the Washington Post and the Baltimore Sun by installing new electronic methods for both editing and printing the paper. Early in the life of Trickett Associates, I set up and led a small team to carry out this work which involved examining the FT’s administrative, editorial, and production areas, visiting equivalent newspapers in the USA and producing a report to document the extent to which Bracken House, the FT’s then headquarters in the City, could be reconfigured to embrace major change. At the end of the process, a three dimensional ‘space planning’ model was used to explain available options to the FT Board (Figure 1). It was in arriving at these options that the disciplines of cybernetics came into play.
Figure 1. Space planning model showing the Financial Times options for change, 1978
The FT project belonged in the category of ‘exceedingly complex’ according to an analysis of comparatives prepared by the UK cyberneticist, Stafford Beer (1959).
In distinguishing between three classes of systems - ‘simple’, ‘complex’ and ‘exceedingly complex’ – Beer gave six examples of the first two types (subdividing them further into ‘deterministic’ and ‘probabilistic’ systems). Under ’simple’ came the window catch, billiards, machine shop layout, penny tossing, jelly fish movements and statistical quality control; under ‘complex’ we find electronic digital computers, planetary systems, automation, stockholding, conditional reflexes and industrial profitability (Figure 2).
Clearly, Beer’s list demonstrates a wry sense of humour which serves to underline his definition of each system’s predictability and its susceptibility for control by well tried scientific methods. For instance, physics tells us about billiard balls; statistics about penny tossing; Operations Research about stockholding and industrial profitability. Under ‘exceedingly complex’ systems (which can have only probabilistic forms) we find just three examples: the economy, the brain and the Company. About the Company, Beer (1959) states:
‘….it is certainly not alive but it has to behave much like a living organism. It is essential to the Company that it develops techniques for survival in a changing environment; it must adapt itself to its economic, commercial, social and political surroundings and it must learn from experience.’
Figure 2. Stafford Beer's classification of systems,
The FT challenge, at first glance, had appeared to be irredeemable. Even the task of defining ‘the problem’ had been elusive and controversial to the extent that a better term might have been ‘tangle’. Now, in applying, retrospectively, the language of cybernetics, which I didn’t do at the time, I can see that the FT tangle could be characterised as being ‘wicked’. (According to Horst Rittel, a design theorist at the Ulm School of Design in Germany, a problem becomes ‘wicked’ when it is difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete, contradictory and changing requirements that are often difficult to recognise (Rith & Dubberly 2006).)
At Bracken House, my aim was to uncover a process by which radical change could be accommodated and then, if necessary, revised and re-accommodated over time. I have vivid memories of investigating the environmental, social, technological and logistical aspects of a tangle where, at every turn, expressions of considerable doubt were voiced by all those whose lives would be radically changed, for better or worse, by an unknown future.
The FT was a company that had suffered over a long period from on-going changes based on intuition, anecdote and casual observation rather than a close study of requirements through consultation. (At the time, in the UK, this was a common trait in company life.) Given the radical nature of the FT’s ambitions, this approach had to change to embrace the behavioural realm: the way buildings affect people, the way people communicate one with another, and the nature of their interface with new and unfamiliar working tools. As Robert Sommer (1969) states in his book, The Behavioral Basis of Design:
‘…….designers need concepts that are relevant to physical form and human behavior – an approach which presupposes that it is possible to define and understand the determinants of people’s behavior at work in some depth.'
Figure 3. The Financial Times newsroom redesigned by Trickett Associates
I can honestly say that the FT project was a mantra for Trickett Associates’ own success because from then on we were able to apply the skills we had developed in guiding the FT into an unpredictable future (on a very slippery road surface) to other companies experiencing similarly fundamental change. The task of arriving at our ‘space planning’ model had taken a constant process of correction and feedback, at all levels within the company; it had enabled us to prioritise the steps that needed to be taken to meet the FT’s brave advance into new technology. Too brave, as it happened, because for the best of reasons the FT’s Board of Directors decided that they would not be the first to take a leap into the unknown.
You may remember that for Rupert Murdoch, who did take this first step at the Times, the result was one year of strikes at his Wapping printing facility. So, as it turned out, the FT’s decision to withdraw was both shrewd and opportunistic as was its decision to move ahead with a fall-back idea to print its paper simultaneously in Frankfurt – a project that involved Trickett Associates in the complete redesign of the editorial department, to include a central electronic ‘brain’ for transferring editorial material to Germany (Figure 3). We applied all the cybernetic principles we had learned previously to achieve a result that was acclaimed some years later by the UK Press Gazette as ‘the most comfortable newsroom in London – a model of thoughtful design.’ Our cybernetic approach had paid off and continued to do so.