For the philosopher Ivan Illich, society became a set of systems rather than a group of people. As such, society depersonalizes life and brings the need for open non-systematized spaces where people can act and interact outside their typical roles. On the other hand, an absence of formal structures may simply open spaces for the informal reproduction of society’s already well-established structures. Given this conjuncture, can systems be designed to foster personal expression? The answer I found in cybernetics is self-organization, a process of adaptation to a context that can grow different organizations depending on what this context provides. This implies that personal expression is a concern in society’s emergent organizations, calling for meta planning to design the context of some of society’s self-organization processes. The cybernetician Gordon Pask argued that depersonalization follows from non-conversational communications, like the ones that develop in large committees. In response, Pask’s fellow cybernetician Stafford Beer proposed a meeting protocol called Team Syntegrity allowing large groups to subdivide into small integrated discussion groups. While Beer’s work has been extensively discussed in existent literature, this article presents the results of four experiments conducted by using variations of Beer’s protocol to understand both the ease with which it can be adapted to different situations, and the implications of its conversational structure on personal expression. The experiment’s realization demonstrates that the protocol’s preparation is laborious and hard to adapt in a timely manner in situations where participant numbers fluctuate. Automation of these processes, however, offers possibilities to use the approach in loosely organized groups. Automation can also help choosing the most appropriate protocol for particular situations through the manipulation of its configuration. Despite difficulties, the protocol offers promise for different purposes, encouraging personal expression in a way that reverberates with others’ personal perspectives.
The article makes a critical reflection on a remote learning experience for training specialists in Spatial Agency for Social Housing -ATHIS. The objective was to promote conditions for students to problematize about 'how' digital technologies could be appropriated in ATHIS. A meta-learning process was envisioned with the objective of experiencing in practice a co-creative dynamic using digital tools. Based on radical constructivist thinking, the proposed methodology used the digital platforms Zoom and Miro to associate two cybernetic collaborative ideation strategies: Team Syntegrity (Beer, 1994), and GIGAmapping (Sevaldson, 2012). The results showed that the experience significantly contributed to the expansion of knowledge of each participant regarding the topics studied and allowed the reverberation of individual contributions throughout the team. Once it has been verified that collaboration interfaces enable but do not guarantee collaborative work, we bring to the discussion three other structuring components that can be allies of simultaneous and integrated online work between groups.
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