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It is quite clear that we have come to, or are rapidly approaching, the end of a special epoch in the industrial West ? characterized by sprawling urban-suburban complexes, massive interlinked highway systems, rich high-technology industries, and profligate consumerism, and fostered by an economic structure that favors an energy-extravagant society. It has been an epoch in which the individual automobile has been the technological heart. Perhaps for this reason, and also for many other reasons, those who are concerned with cities seem to be reformulating basic or root questions: ?What is a city?? ?Why does it work, why does it not work?? Dependent upon one's answers to these questions will be the kind of ?solution? one poses for the problems with which our cities are palpably afflicted.

The prospect of sitting atop a Saturn missile and being propelled to orbital heights is probably not every engineer's idea of fun, but EE-scientist-astronaut Own Garriott experienced just that ? and then circled the earth in Skylab 3 on an orbital mission that lasted nearly two months and brought him both pleasure and satisfaction.

Gordon Moore, president of Intel, put it succinctly: “By 1986, the semiconductor industry could be producing something of the order of 1014 functions per year. Who will use it all?” He, and 800 other participants in a recent colloquium in California's Silicon Valley, organized by the Santa Clara Chapter of IEEE's Electron Devices Society, heard some attempts at answers from industry leaders. But Dr. Moore was not satisfied. The rate of growth is such, he told Spectrum in a follow-up interview, that if the industry stays on its present upward curve of producing functions and tries to solve its problems as it always has in the past — by lowering prices — there will come a time in the 1980s when it could face disruption and a significant drop in revenues. “And that,” he says, “despite exciting new markets on the horizon, in an otherwise blossoming economy, could be a disaster.”

Two principles guided George Dantzig and Thomas Saaty in their design research for the compact city: conservation of space ? namely, an effective use of vertical space; and conservation of time ? namely, a set of urban facilities that would be utilized 24 hours a day. They started unabashedly and squarely with systems science and operations research, aiming at a city design that would maximize efficiency and minimize cost. Out of this approach, they derived a cake-shaped, cylindrical, totally enclosed city structure that minimizes transportation costs, minimizes energy losses, minimizes traffic congestion through vertical and horizontal flows, and that supposedly modulates peak loads on service functions by arranging life and work across a 24-hour ?day.?

Best-known, most publicized, and least built of radical new city concepts are the ?arcologies? of Paolo Soleri, an Italian-born and -trained architect who has made his home for many years outside Scottsdale, Ariz. An arcology ? a word coined by Soleri, connoting architecture plus ecology ? is a self-contained, morphologically various, three-dimensional structure that constitutes a whole living city in itself. Although some people may regard Soleri's designs as megastructures, he is careful to remind us that they are really a form of miniaturization of cities, in which functional interactions are highly integrated. Thus arcologies embody ideas far more soaring than the primordial housing and city functioning that most megastructure or merely monumental concepts suggest. Arcologies are lit by a visual imagination whose only match in words (for my money) appears in Invisible Cities, a poetic novel by the Italian writer Italo Calvino, or in Anabasis by St. John Perse.

Public pressure stemming from blackouts, energy shortages, environmental concerns, and the growing threat of Federal intervention in the power field have combined to galvanize the utility industry into taking action by forming the Electric Power Research Institute, or EPRI. Set up in 1973 to manage a coordinated RD fossil fuels; transmission and distribution; and energy systems, environment, and conservation. Some of the more interesting efforts, which will be described in greater detail further on in this article, include: a computer code for plutonium recycle in light water reactors, coal conversion into fuel products containing low quantities of ash and sulfur, and simplified methods of effecting cable splices.

In early September an international conference was held in Washington, D.C., to assess the rapidly changing and vigorous interaction between the engineering sciences and biology and medicine. Leaders from these fields discussed ways and means of broadening the scientific base for the biomedical field, expressed their dissatisfactions with present support mechanisms, explored the difficulties in bringing computers into the clinical and hospital situations, emphasized the need for training the right kind of people for biomedical endeavors, saw the emergence of the ``whole systems approach'' as a healthy symptom, predicted greater multidisciplinary teamwork, greater use of computers, and a far deeper impact of biomedical engineering in the years ahead. One major hindrance to more rapid advances was said to be not science-centered but society-centered, rooted in our expression of social values. This article highlights this unusual and unusually productive conference.

This second and concluding article scans over some of the new kinds of human factors problems that have emerged as a result of recent technological advances. The article discusses aspects of these new problems in the following major areas: man-computer interaction (psychological problems related to on-line usage, the need for more "natural" interaction languages, graphical communication); man-vehicle control and guidance systems (better models of human controller, novel systems); communications (computers in telephone information services, satellite relays); advanced space systems ("learning" and display problems related to incorporation of computers in prelaunch activities). Last, a recent study in human information processing is cited that points up a general problemߞthe need for rational optimal models of human functioning.

This article, which follows up on the December 1965 Proceedings of the IEEE special issue on nuclear test detection, outlines the problems of underground detection and identification, offers some background in geophysics that the nonspecialist needs to get a perspective on the niceties of the engineering problems, cites some of the criteria whereby underground events are discriminated, and assesses the present state of the art. It concludes with a description of LASA, the largest seismic array ever built, and speculates on the possible political effects of the recent scientific and technical developments.

As decribed in Part I, the collaboration of art and engineering in the creation of new art works has become a serious preoccupation of many modern artists, who are asking for the help of engineers. A number of organizations now exist whose aim is to facilitate the contact between artists and engineers and to help support them in their collaborative projects. You need not be a Renaissance Man, it is said, to apply for a match with an artist. It won't be all fun and games, although part of it will be, and you might even end up doing something so useless from an engineering point of view, and so right from another point of view, that you could begin wondering why engineering is practiced the way it is?i.e., you might get turned on. This article tells you a bit about what it was like for some others who have already tried, and calls on you to join the action.

This article describes how a device developed by engineers for engineering applications ? the ultrasonic transducer ? was slowly converted to medical research and application. Like the X ray, ultrasonics can penetrate the living body, and can be used for studying inner structures, with the advantage that it avoids the hazards of X radiation. The development of appropriate ultrasonic systems, many of whose problems parallel those encountered in early radiology, has brought ultrasonics to the point where it can be used almost routinely in the study of conditions in the eye, brain, heart, and abdomen.

Constructed and maintained under cruel Arctic conditions, the DEWLine was established principally to act as an early warning system against the approach of manned bombers; but with the development of ballistic missiles, with the construction of BMEWS further north, and with the increasing military and other communications traffic across it, the emphasis on DEWLine functions has been shifting. This article reviews some of the highlights of DEWLine's evolution and its development, after a three-year upgrading program, into a study, high-capacity communications network.

Many artists today, especially those in the younger generation, are looking to modern technology as a new medium in which to delve, and they are looking, as well, for engineers to assist them and to collaborate with them on their works. This two-part article describes certain aspects of the art-and-technology movement, and speculates on some of its possible consequences. Part I traces the roots of current artistic interest in technology and describes modes of collaboration. Part II will describe some of the experiences of those who have already engaged in collaborative projects, discuss organizations that have been formed to facilitate the collaborative process, and ask you to consider the possibility of jumping in yourself or lending your organization's support.

Our previous article proposed a very broad evolving and ecological ``think,'' urging designers to begin considering new types of systems, some to incorporate artificial intelligence, to work for the enhancement of human powers. Here we describe some bases of that think, and attempt to join researches that, as they evolve, could form the ingredients of evolutionary systems. In the broadest sense, we attempt to interpret aspects of today's science and technology within the evolutionary framework, hoping to stimulate a dialogue among all kinds of system designers.

The thrust of this article is this: There is a need now, more than ever before, for men to stretch their capacities in what we shall call evolutionary skills. Moreover, it is at last becoming possible technologically to enhance these skills in man by incorporating somewhat similar evolutionary skills in the machines which we design and build. However, if engineers are to develop machines with evolutionary capabilities, they will need to restructure their own way of thinking, throw out traditional ways of thinking, and find their way, through playing with evolutionary design techniques, into an ever-deepening understanding of the significance of such techniques. They must bootstrap themselves into a new kind of ``think,'' into a new climate of man-machine interaction, in which men evolve intelligent machines and intelligent machines evolve men. This new kind of think is what this article tries to unfold in an effort to spur lively support for the evolutionary direction.

A survey of a dramatic field of endeavor: in which the role of engineers is assessed, and in which eminent doctors and engineers voice their views on the many problems involved — medical, technical, and otherwise There is no doubt that engineers can and do play an important role in the development of artificial organs for humans, just as there is little doubt now in the minds of most of the major investigators in this field that, as in the case of the total artificial heart, such developments are completely feasible, and will, in fact, come about.

This introductory article describes something of the origin, setting, and evolution of human factors engineering as an organized discipline, and provides an overview of some of its major ramifications. It finds that despite the parochial military auspices under which the work began, HFE now encompasses a bewildering diversity of subjects and aims. It traces the development of the man-machine system concept (central to much human factors thinking), discusses the comparative roles of psychology and engineering, and, in the broadest sense, discusses the role of the human factors engineer vis-a-vis the question of man in the man-made environment. In conclusion, it asks whether or not there may be more to the HFE "name" problem than meets the eye.

This report on the First Annual Symposium of the newly formed American Society for Cybernetics describes the papers presented under three broad categories of purposive systems?man, machines, and men and machines together. The discussion ranges from purposive behavior at the level of genetic evolution to the purposive behavior of organisms as complex as modern society. In this period when the growth of technology threatens to overwhelm society, cybernetics is seen as a science offering the hope of solutions and of broader interdisciplinary and international communication.

``How do we go about understanding brains?'' That was the fundamental question confronting the session, ``To Understand Brains. . . ,'' at the 1968 IEEE International Convention. This report on the views of eight session participants shows a strong consensus on three major points: first, that the popular analogy between brains and computers is ill-taken and perhaps misleading; second, that very little is understood about nervous system function, despite the accumulation of seas of data, and that present understanding is relatively restricted to events in the peripheral sensory systems; third, that the epistemological problem?what is really meant by ``understanding'' the nervous system?is especially difficult with respect to the staggering complexities in a system composed of ten billion cells, each of which might be regarded as a kind of hybrid microcomputer in itself. The cry for new concepts of the nervous system was especially strong, and though the participants did not regard the endeavor to understand brains as absolutely hopeless, their stress on the magnitude of the problems made their ``realistic'' appraisals seem quite pessimistic.