How can we think clearly about systems, like generative AI, climate infrastructure, or digital identity, when change feels exponential and the ground beneath us keeps shifting? In times like these, the past is not just something we leave behind. It’s an active ingredient in how futures are imagined, built, and contested.

John McHale’s reminder that our present is the fruit of past choices, and that the future will likewise be built by our choices in the present, takes on particular weight in cybernetics, where feedback and feedforward loops mean the outputs of today shape the inputs and new outputs of tomorrow. The futures we are heading toward are entangled with the futures once imagined by governments, industries, cultures, or individuals, and those imagined futures live on in our systems, policies, and infrastructures.

In Feedforward paper three, we introduced the Cybernetic Futures Framework as a tool for mapping the dynamic relationships between imaginaries, infrastructures, and agents of change. In this Feedforward paper, we introduce its close companion: the Cybernetic Futures Compass. This tool is designed to help researchers, policymakers, designers, and others navigate a broader and more fluid understanding of the systems they are working in, and the futures they are shaping.

Traditional roadmaps and plans assume a fixed, known destination. But when the system itself is changing, and when our assumptions about what ‘progress’ looks like are being contested, we can’t just imagine a fixed desirable end-state and go directly there. We need something else. Navigating towards a known, stable destination is an exercise in ‘knowing before we go’. We instead may need to develop approaches more akin to wayfinding, which enable to ‘know as we go’ or even ‘know through going’.

The Cybernetic Futures Compass is a wayfinding tool for moments of uncertainty. It helps us orient ourselves within systems that are evolving, entangled, and unpredictable, especially when boundaries blur between past, present, and future.

It draws inspiration from:

  • Marshall McLuhan’s Tetrad of Media Effects, which interrogates how technologies extend, reverse, retrieve, or render obsolete existing conditions.
  • Ongoing work at the ANU School of Cybernetics on contextualising computational objects, their processes and consequences, as well as new technologies within organisations.
  • Research reports (such the case study below) that illuminate and critique the imaginaries embedded in the development of global technologies and systems.
  • Genevieve Bell and colleagues’ new cybernetic methodological insights into investigating and understanding past and future social-technological systems and their associated imganinaries, particularly 19th-century telegraphy in Australia.
  • Ray Ison’s active positionality in formulating and applying a ‘system of interest’ which he describes as a choice to move “from naming, describing or discovering systems to orchestrating a process of learning which can lead to changes in understandings and practices.”
  • Jilda Andrews’ helpful invitation to “bring historical collections into direct relationship with the present” and her call to action to “purposefully disrupt disciplinary conventionality as a way to make room for other ways of building knowledge with objects.”
  • Michael Lissack’s articulation of the dialectical relationship between questioning and understanding, and in particular the value of second-order questioning – or interrogating our questioning practices – in ensuring that the frames and practices that we engage into do not become limitations on our ability to reimagine and act in systems.

The Cybernetic Futures Compass#

We can think of the Cybernetic Futures Compass as a temporally aware lens with a system of interest as its center and questions emanating outward along four directions: before and after, and inside and outside. To begin with, the system of interest can be broad and loosely defined as something such as: ‘Artificial intelligence’ or ‘service robots or ‘my organisation, sector or practice’. Each quadrant of the compass invites different lines of inquiry. Together, they form a way of moving cybernetically through complex systems by examining their contexts, temporalities, and relationships.

Time#

The Time axis of the compass invites us to explore both the origins of the system, and its ‘pre-history’, as well as think where the system is going, and later into futures in which the system may have gone to scale, been decommissioned or become defunct. This requires us to explore the life cycle and consequences of the system of interest through a broader continuum of time. Rather than a slider along a linear time axis, this practice is an invitation to explore the pasts and futures that were factored into the running, maintenance and evolution of the system at given points in time. By exploring the evolution of these factors and their relationships, we gain insights into what has become embedded into the system and what was ignored or abandoned and ask why, by whom, and under what conditions.

Connections#

The Connections axis of the compass invites us to explore the relationships that exist, both between the components inside the system of interest, and between the system of interest and its external environment. This requires us to think about where we place the boundaries of our system: what’s inside and what’s outside. This approach goes beyond finding causes but helps consider a richer constellation of context, contingencies, and consequences. By varying the connections we foreground and the boundaries we trace, we gain insights into the perspectives and relationships that construct an understanding of the system of interest.

Exploring the system of interest along these two dimensions invites us to think of the co-evolution of the system and its context. It leads us to explore and illuminate who and what was involved or missing in imagining, shaping and steering the system, and how the system, in turn, impacted its environment and the field of imaginable futures. Doing so broadens our understanding of the system, from ‘here and now’ to a longer and broader set of interconnected imaginaries, infrastructures and agents of change, which we can map onto the Cybernetic Futures Framework.

Using the Cybernetic Futures Compass#

When designing possible futures, we rarely start with complete knowledge. Our systems of interest are often loosely defined and their boundaries contested. The Cybernetic Futures Compass supports iterative, layered exploration. We often begin with a broad concept and refine it through critical questioning to better understand system boundaries and key components.

Once a system of interest is situated, we can move through one or several of the _Cybernetic Futures Compass _directions by asking critical questions such as:

By stepping into each axis with guided questions, we move beyond the ‘here and now’. We begin to see how the system evolved, who shaped it, what was left out, and what alternative directions might be possible.

Seeing Systems Differently#

What makes the Compass unique is its ability to reframe what counts as the system. As we move outward in time or connection, our system of interest may itself shift. What began as digital identity may become a story about national infrastructure, or about bureaucratic trust, or colonial models of citizenship.

This recursive reframing is core to cybernetic sensemaking: we don’t just analyse the system—we reflect on how our framing of the system is produced, contested, and open to change. We illustrate this through a case study of our recent work.

Exploring the Metaverse with the Compass#

In 2023, the ANU School of Cybernetics applied the Cybernetic Futures Compass and Cybernetic Futures Framework to the ‘metaverse’. Beginning with the metaverse as a system imagined in contemporary tech discourse, we traced its origin stories in science fiction, its links to earlier attempts at immersive virtual spaces, and the alternative imaginaries that were ignored or suppressed along the way.

By stepping into the Before and Outside quadrants, we surfaced foundational assumptions: about presence, identity, ownership, and infrastructure. Moving to After and Inside we considered what futures were being built in today’s design decisions, and who might be left out of them. Beyond critique, this created the ground from which explorations of alternative futures with and through the metaverse were possible if we re/imagined it under different sets of assumptions and agendas.

This Cybernetic Futures Compass based approach didn’t aim to predict where the metaverse was going. Instead, it enabled us to see how the metaverse was already shaping, and shaped by, other cybernetic systems, from data policy to cultural imagination.

The value of using the Cybernetic Futures Compass#

  • It slows down decision-making and invites reflection in the face of urgency.
  • It makes visible the stories, exclusions, and trajectories that underlie technical systems.
  • It offers a flexible method for engaging across disciplines, stakeholders, and scales.
  • It brings cybernetic principles of feedback, feedforward, requisite variety, and participation into futures practice.
  • It provides the opportunity to address what Michael Lissack calls “uncritically examined presuppositions”: the unquestioned assumptions, often implicit, that shape a practice.

What comes next?#

The Compass does not tell us what to do, but it helps us ask better questions. Questions that shift our vantage point. Questions that surface what’s missing. That opens up space for new kinds of futures. In our next brief, we’ll turn our attention to those futures; futures that are hopeful, plural, and designed with care.

BEFORE#

  • Where, when and by whom was the name of the system coined?
  • What pre-existing systems does the system build on, replace or reproduce?
  • What ideas and stories underpin the system?
  • What and whose attitudes are embedded in the system?

OUTSIDE#

  • How does the system interact with other existing systems?
  • What are the inputs into, and outputs from, the system?
  • Who misuses the system, by mistake or on purpose? How and why?
  • Is there a similar system in operation in another location?

AFTER#

  • What is the purpose of the system?
  • What needs to be true (or stay true) for the system to operate successfully?
  • How will people encounter the system? What stories do they tell?
  • When and how will the system be decommissioned?

INSIDE#

  • What components are part of the system and how are they connected?
  • What resources, skills and infrastructures are required to build, sustain and maintain the system?
  • Does the system do what it ‘says’ it does?
  • What media are used to design and communicate about the system?

You are on Aboriginal land.

The Australian National University acknowledges, celebrates, and pays our respects to the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people of the Canberra region and to all First Nations Australians on whose traditional lands we meet and work as the oldest continuing culture and knowledges in human history.

bars search times