A woodland pond.
Beer went out and took woodland ponds from Derbyshire and Surrey. Water, weeds, bugs, micro-organisms, a leech. Then he suspended lights in the water to communicate inputs from the factory, and used photocells to measure cloudiness of the pond as a kind of output.
He kept this pond in a tank in his house. He tinkered with it in the middle of the night, trying to speak to it.
Okay, it didn't work. In 2014, our factories aren't run by ponds, unless Shenzhen is even weirder than I thought.
But I love this idea of Stafford Beer in his basement, trying to make a breakthrough, trying to make first contact.
Mind you, Stafford Beer also tried to teach mice how to solve differential equations.
Imagine if we'd spent the last 50 years on self-organising biological ecosystems instead of transistors. It doesn't seem entirely absurd to me. Intel have put a lot of effort into computer chips, of course they're really good now.
Source: How Many Grapes Went Into the Wine: Stafford Beer on the Art and Science of Holistic Management, Stafford Beer. Via The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future, Andrew Pickering.
Matt Webb, Web Directions South 2014 (Sydney, Australia), October 2014