Bodies
Environments
Cybernetic Systems
Cybernetic Systems: Bodies and Environments (ID5402/4402) examine design through the lens of cybernetics, focusing on feedback, control, and adaptation between sensing and actuation across bodies and spaces. Rather than treating technology as isolated components, the course emphasizes systems thinking: how signals circulate, how behaviors emerge, and how designed feedback loops influence individual experience, collective action, and environmental awareness and regulation. Through lectures, hands-on labs, and project-based work, students prototype smart objects/products and on-body and spatial systems using sensors, actuators, and microcontrollers. Applications span health and well-being, responsive environments, ecological systems, and experimental interactive media.
The course brings together methods and perspectives from design, engineering, the arts, and the sciences, with design as the primary driver of inquiry and synthesis. Students learn fundamental and practical knowledge in computation and physical prototyping, while engaging with aesthetic, cultural, and ethical inquiry and applying design processes to create new forms of on-body, smart product, and environmental technologies.
Course Overview
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Cybernetic Design
Bodies, media, and environments. Feedback loops, conditions, and emergence. Human-machine interaction.
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Prototyping Foundations
Microcontroller programming, electronics, signals and control, communications. Soft, wearable and hardware development.
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Sensing: Perception and Interpretation
Bodily (bioelectric, kinematic), affective, physiological, and environmental (climate and ecological) sensing. Spatial and distributed systems. Multi-modal sensory inputs.
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Actuation: Feedback and Intervention
Haptic, thermal, visual, auditory, olfactory interfaces. Temporal dynamics. Soft and material-based actuators. Awareness and behavioral feedback.
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Closed-loop Systems
Adaptive and predictive systems: personalization, contextual, and intelligent feedback. Cybernetic loops.
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Critical Perspectives and Futures
Health and well-being. Sensory augmentation. User and environmental design methods. Cultural and ethical considerations.
The course is offered to both Master (ID5402) and 4th-year Undergraduate students (ID4402), with differentiated grading criteria and submission requirements.
For the final group project, students will develop a working prototype of a wearable/environmental cybernetic system. The project will be assessed based on the integration and functionality of the working prototype, as well as the quality of technical, visual, and process documentation.
Additional assessment components include class participation, an evaluation and reflection report, and two lab assignments. The lab assignments are intended to support the development of technical skills and design methods that feed into the final prototype.