Cybernetic Modern Design in Emerging Post-Fordism : Systems Thinking, Industrial Transformation, and the Logic of Flexible Accumulation

The article investigates how early cybernetics shaped late modern design within the broader transformation from Fordist mass production to post-Fordist regimes of flexible accumulation between 1945 and 1975. It argues that transformations of capitalist production regimes constitute a necessary framework for analysing the designed environment. Part I outlines Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics as an interdisciplinary methodology emerging from the Fordist military–industrial production, highlighting its implications for automation, networked infrastructures, and information-based conceptions of economy and labour. Part II examines two Bauhaus successor institutions—the HfG Ulm and The New Bauhaus/Institute of Design—to show how cybernetic concepts informed the shift from object-centred to systems-oriented design, redefining the designer as a coordinator of complex socio-technical networks. The article argues that cybernetics simultaneously expanded design’s methodological repertoire and integrated it more tightly into industrial rationalisation and f lexible production, while also contributing to the depoliticisation of modernist utopias by reframing political and social projects as technical problems of control, communication, and optimisation.