[Sci-tech-public] STS Brown Bag Talk -- Tuesday, November 18

[Debbie Meinbresse]

STS Brown Bag Talk - Tuesday, November 18th

Soviet Cybernetics, Design, and Control-Rooms

Margareta Tillberg
  Humboldt University; visiting researcher, the Max Planck Institute 
for the History of Science, Berlin

12:00 noon - 1:30 pm, MIT, E51-275


Feel free to bring your lunch

Abstract:
The All-Union Scientific Research Institute for Technical Aesthetics 
was founded in Moscow in 1962 to invent new design methods by 
exploring the relationships
among science, technology, and art. Artists, engineers, architects, 
mathematicians, physiologists and economists participated in 
multi-disciplinary research groups at the Institute. Among the 
projects carried out at the Institute was the design of control rooms 
for various Soviet enterprises, including nuclear power plants. The 
visual and organizational design of these spaces involved complex 
studies by specialists in ergonomics, engineering psychology, 
cybernetics, and art. This paper will discuss specific examples of 
control room design in a wider context of Soviet attitudes toward 
industrial design.

Bio:
Dr. Margareta Tillberg is a research associate in the Department of 
History of Science and Technology, Royal Institute of Technology, 
Stockholm, and a visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the 
History of Science in Berlin. She is the author of Coloured Universe 
and the Russian Avant-Garde. Matiushin on Colour Vision in Stalin's 
Russia (Stockholm, 2003). Her current project at the MPI, "Observer 
and Observed in Soviet State Design Institutes, 1960s-1990s," is part 
of the MPI program, "The History of Scientific Observation" (see 
http://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/en/research/projects/DeptII_Tillberg-ObservationSovietStateDesign/index_html).


Note:  a schedule of events for the upcoming week is posted on the 
STS website: http://web.mit.edu/sts

Debbie Meinbresse
STS Program, MIT
617-452-2390
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