How do minds, machines, and living systems make sense of their worlds, and what kind of future could we build with that understanding? In 1948 Norbert Wiener, a founder of cybernetics, wrote that “the most fruitful areas for the growth of the sciences were those which had been neglected as a no-man’s land between the various established fields,” and that “it is the boundary regions of science which offer the richest opportunity to the qualified investigator.” The Macy conferences that launched cybernetics were built to explore that ground. They brought mathematicians, engineers, biologists, anthropologists, and psychiatrists into the same room, and their ideas later inspired generations of artists and designers. A generation later, Ivan Illich’s idea of convivial tools, technologies that widen people’s freedom and creativity rather than their dependence, helped inspire the hobbyist culture behind the personal computer.
This one-day gathering explores what these two approaches to technology share and where they pull apart. Both treat technology as part of how people and the living world hold together. But cybernetics sought integrated systems of feedback and control, while Illich warned against tools and systems that manage people from above and leave them dependent. Those questions are resurfacing now, in debates over AI, ecology, care, and community. We invite researchers, philosophers, artists, designers, and other creative practitioners to explore them together, and to imagine technologies that are inventive and convivial at once: built with communities, working with living systems rather than against them, and made for care and repair as much as for growth. We also want to hold space for the rigorous research now shaping emerging technologies, on the bet that precision and openness belong together, and that the hardest problems in science will yield to work that is both technically sound and humanly shared.