About the voyage

Cybernetics, a pathway to navigate complexity.

Kuberknots is a podcast for listeners who are curious about cybernetics, control, communication, and the systems that shape everyday life.

Why cybernetics?

Cybernetics offers a language for noticing that the world is not made of isolated parts, but of relationships, signals, feedback loops, and changing environments. It helps us see interconnectedness: a city’s transport, energy, housing, weather, and social rhythms shape one another, so a change in one place can ripple through the whole. It also helps us ask how systems optimise their structures for better function: a thermostat adjusts heating, an immune system reallocates resources, and a traffic network retimes signals to keep movement within workable limits.

Cybernetics is equally useful for thinking about resilience. Robust systems do not simply avoid disturbance; they sense noise, compare it with what matters, and adapt. A power grid rerouting around a fault, a robot filtering noisy sensor data, or a community reorganising after a flood all show communication and control under pressure and perturbations.

As systems scale, cybernetics also draws attention to emergence: ant colonies build trails without a central planner, online communities produce trends no single user designed, and many local decisions in a market can create patterns that feel larger than any individual actor.

Sound familiar? You are all ready to embark on a journey with us!

What Kuberknots explores

Kuberknots explores cybernetics as a way of asking how systems sense, communicate, decide, and change. Episodes connect classic ideas such as feedback, control, variety, autonomy, adaptation, and emergence with contemporary questions about AI, energy, design, organisations, ecology, and everyday life.

Who it is for

Kuberknots is for curious listeners who want rigorous ideas without needing to start with specialist vocabulary. Students, researchers, designers, engineers, educators, policy thinkers, and lifelong learners are all welcome. No advanced mathematics is required; the aim is to make complex systems feel approachable, useful, and memorable.

On the name “Kuberknots”

Kuberknots weaves two ideas together: “kuber-” comes from the Greek word, kubernētēs, meaning “steersman” or “governor”. It’s the root of the word cybernetics — the study of guidance, feedback, and control in complex systems, from our own bodies to societies and ecosystems. The word “knots” symbolises the connections we form between ideas, technologies, and people, as we navigate our interconnected world.

Host

Season 2 is hosted by Sungyeon Hong, continuing the Kuberknots voyage with curiosity, playfulness, and a focus on cybernetics as a language for tying ideas together.

Sungyeon became fascinated by cybernetics as a unifying language for making sense of patterns across humans and machines, society and technology. Through Kuberknots, she invites listeners to explore the art of communication and control: how systems sense, respond, learn, adapt, and sometimes surprise us.

Credits and supporters

We acknowledge the generous support of the ANU School of Cybernetics and the IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics Society for Kuberknots since 2025.

Kuberknots Season 1 was co-hosted by Sungyeon Hong and Rebbecca TY Thien. Rebbecca, a control theorist with deep experience in control-related research, helped shape the early conversations and brought clarity, technical insight, and enthusiasm to the project. We gratefully acknowledge her contribution to Season 1 and the foundation she helped build.

The content in our recordings is intended for educational and informational purposes only. All rights to the music used belong to Suno AI. All drawings featured are original works produced in-house by Sungyeon unless stated otherwise.