Thomas Biedermann
Australian National University (ANU)
Biography
Thomas is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Cybernetics, at the Australian National University (ANU). He integrates his background in systems engineering and interests in organisational design to research and deploy methods to create safe, sustainable, and responsible systems. His approaches draw on cybernetics, visual arts, and playcentric and embodied methods, to support diverse participants in imagining and acting towards hopeful futures. His current research program develops and evaluates Gameful Experiences for Hopeful Futures. He has applied these approaches in various contexts and at various scales, including a Sino-French joint research lab on haematology in Shanghai; the science diplomacy sections of French embassies in the USA and Australia; and the Australian Higher Education sector. Prior to his current role, he has served as inaugural manager of the 3AI Innovation Institute at ANU, and inaugural program manager for the ANU-wide decarbonisation program, Below Zero. Thomas enjoys combining analysis and his systems engineering training with the creativity and joyfulness of visual arts and gameful design to support major societal transformations.
Sessions
Gameful Experiences for Hopeful Futures: CyberNations
'If that Cybernetics stuff is so valuable, why don’t you teach it in primary school?'' This provocation started the Gameful Experiences for Hopeful Futures program at the Australian National University School of Cybernetics. How do we teach organisational cybernetics to broader and younger audiences, using creative pedagogies? How do we build practices that embed into our ways of thinking and doing what Stafford called the 'holistic message [of cybernetics]: a science of the regulation of large, complex, probabilistic systems actually exists that is interdisciplinary in approach and consequently inclusive in its world view.' This (ideally 2-hour but adaptable) interactive workshop offers three gameful steps into these questions. First, a short choose-your-own-adventure presentation, in which the audience steers the speaker through an introductory exploration of cybernetics, games, and culture. Second, a facilitated playthrough of CyberNations: an experiment in teaching cybernetic futures in classrooms and board rooms through a semi-cooperative, persistent board game. Inspired by Stafford’s work and Australian First Nations ways of knowing and being, CyberNations teaches core concepts of systems dynamics, requisite variety, intergenerational responsibility, and the fundamental structural coupling between societies and environments. Third, a facilitated debriefing reflecting on the experience, inviting the audience to challenge and contribute to the model. This workshop and its components have been iteratively developed through deliveries in Australian classrooms, playrooms and team-building exercises, espousing Metaphorum’s values of critical, creative and collaborative re-invention. It may interest researchers, educators and practitioners interested in the contribution that game-based learning could make to the Barefoot Cybernetics agenda.