Reminder: ASC Speaker Series Season #5 - Pluriversal Ecologies: Empathy, Intersubjectivity, and More-than-Human Design

[Mateus vanStralen]

ASC Speakers Series Season #5: Fresh Eyes / New Voices

presents:

Pluriversal Ecologies: Empathy, Intersubjectivity, and More-than-Human Design

A conversation on the role of human subjectivity in understanding more-than-human lifeworlds.

Sunday, Apr 13, 9:00 PDT, 12:00 EDT, 18:00 CEST 

FREE REGISTRATION

Can human cognition and sensitivity truly perceive and meaningfully engage with nonhuman’s lifeworlds? And if so, to what extent are they necessary or even desirable?

In this session, Annan Zuo shares his journey into cybernetics through a series of interwoven design-research projects on empathy, intersubjectivity, and more-than-human ecologies with their multitude of lifeworlds. From architectural explorations of multispecies care in the Satoyama landscapes of Kyoto, to sound-based experiments that construct auditory loops with a more-than-human Umwelt, and theoretical work on enactive biosemiotic domains, Annan’s work explores the role of human subjectivity in sensing, interpreting, and relating to other-than-human forms of life.

A persistent question recurs throughout Annan’s work: If the (full) understanding of the other—whether human or nonhuman—is ultimately unattainable, how can we conceive intersubjectivity? Can empathetic engagement serve not as a means of comprehension, but as a mode of attunement, co-presence, and ethical responsiveness?

Annan Zuo will be joined by Claudia Westermann and Frederick Steier in a conversational exploration of the resonances between cybernetic theory, empathy, and more-than-human design. Drawing on key ideas from Gregory Bateson and Humberto Maturana, the discussion will explore how systems thinking and pluralist ecologies might accommodate subjectivity, empathetic entanglement, and communicative gaps between species.

The session will be conversational and participatory. Audience members are warmly invited to join the discussion as it unfolds around empathy, intersubjectivity, and languaging as ways of shaping pluralist ecologies.

Participants Bios

Annan Zuo is a more-than-human researcher and architectural designer. He holds an MPhil in Architecture and Urban Design (RIBA, Part 2) from the University of Cambridge and currently works at Foster + Partners in London. In October 2025, he will begin a PhD in Geography and the Environment at the University of Oxford. His research focuses on post-phenomenology, intersubjectivity, more-than-human architecture, landscape recovery, empathy, and care. Annan’s design work has been featured at international and cross-disciplinary exhibitions. He is the recipient of the 2024 BioDesign Challenge Grand Prize and was nominated for both the RIBA Bronze and Silver Medals.

Frederick Steier is Professor in the School of Leadership Studies at Fielding Graduate University, and Emeritus at the University of South Florida, where he directed Interdisciplinary Studies Programs. His work centres on systemic approaches to social and ecological systems, with a focus on whole systems design and multi-level learning. He edited Gregory Bateson: Essays for an Ecology of Ideas (2005) and co-edited Mary Catherine Bateson: Compositions in Living Cybernetics and Humberto Maturana: Reflections on Bringing Forth Worlds (both 2023). He has led participatory research in diverse settings, including NASA and MOSI. In 2019, he received the Norbert Wiener Award from the American Society for Cybernetics. In 1985, he was named a King Olav V Fellow by the American-Scandinavian Foundation.

 
Claudia Westermann is a researcher, artist and licensed architect, and a senior associate professor at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University in Suzhou, China. She is a member of the German Chamber of Architects, Vice President of the American Society for Cybernetics (ASC), and managing co-editor of the journal Technoetic Arts. Informed by second-order cybernetics, Claudia Westermann's research and practice actualise in interdisciplinary projects concerned with the ecologies, poetics, technologies and philosophies of art and design. Claudia Westermann's projects have been shown in many prestigious exhibitions. She received the Margaret Mead Prize from the American Society for Cybernetics in 2024.

FREE REGISTRATION

Mateus van Stralen

ASC Speaker Series Team

American Society for Cybernetics

http://asc-cybernetics.org/