In Their Own Words

Humour

“I have reached an age where my feedback loops are starting to have significant time-lags.”

In engineering, a “time lag” in a feedback loop usually leads to instability or oscillation in a system; by applying this to his own aging body and mind, he was poking fun at his slowing reflexes while remaining a “systems man” to the core. Arthur was known for his wit and charm in academic circles and he frequently quoted or paraphrased his friend Marshall McLuhan, whose puns and probes he found deeply amusing. He particularly enjoyed McLuhan’s paradoxical style, which Porter viewed as a humorous way to reveal the invisible systems surrounding us.

 

Professional Activities

Arthur Porter was a polymath whose professional career bridged the worlds of physics, early computing, and industrial engineering. He gained early prominence in the 1930s by collaborating with Douglas Hartree to build the Differential Analyser, one of the world’s first analog computers, using Meccano components. From 1937 to 1939, Porter completed a post-doctoral fellowship at MIT, U.S.A. During World War II, his expertise was utilized by the British Admiralty for research into radar and anti-aircraft predictors.

In the post-war era, Porter worked as the Director for Research at Ferranti Electric in Toronto, Canada. He later became a pivotal figure in Canadian academia and served as the Dean of Engineering at the University of Saskatchewan before moving to the University of Toronto where he founded the Department of Industrial Engineering. A pioneer of cybernetics, he famously collaborated with Marshall McLuhan, providing the scientific framework for McLuhan’s theories on media and technology.

Porter was a significant public intellectual. He chaired the Royal Commission on Electric Power Planning, titled the Porter Commission, in Ontario from 1975 to 1980 shaping the province’s energy policy. For his contributions to science and education, he was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada. His career was defined by an interdisciplinary approach, linking the hard sciences with the humanities to understand technology’s impact on society.

 

Contributions To Canada’s Systems Thinking Literacy

• Academic leadership: He founded the University of Toronto’s Department of Industrial Engineering, introducing a curriculum that treated organizations as integrated human-machine systems.
• Cultural integration: Collaborating with Marshall McLuhan, he applied cybernetic concepts like feedback loops to media theory, bridging the gap between engineering and the humanities.
• Public policy: Through the Porter Commission, he educated the public and government on viewing the electrical grid as a socio-technical system where energy, environment, and society intersect. His membership in the Canadian Association for the Club of Rome was essential to his later life advocacy for long-term systemic thinking regarding the earth’s resources.
• Interdisciplinary advocacy: He promoted a wholistic literacy, teaching Canadians to manage complex, large-scale systems by balancing technical logic with human values. Inducted to the Canadian Science and Engineering Hall of Fame which recognized his status as a “Renaissance Man” of science and a pioneer in several critical fields.
• Intellectual convergence: Porter recognized that Jay Forrester was doing with digital computers what he had tried to do decades earlier with analog computers (the Differential Analyser). Porter served as a key bridge, translating Forrester’s complex system dynamics for Canadian policymakers and academics.
• Officer of the Order of Canada: Appointed for his work at the University of Toronto and his leadership of the Porter Commission (The Royal Commission on Electric Power Planning), which was one of the most significant applications of systems thinking to public policy in Canadian history.

 

Contributions To Canadian K-12 education  

 Arthur influenced Canada’s K-12 education primarily by advocating for systems thinking and technological literacy as essential life skills. His impact includes:

• Interdisciplinary curriculum: By bridging the Two Cultures (science and humanities), Porter encouraged a holistic approach to education. This influenced the shift toward integrated curricula where students study the social impacts of technology, rather than just technical mechanics.
• Early computer literacy: His leadership at Ferranti and the University of Toronto helped establish Ontario as a global tech hub. This indirectly accelerated the introduction of computer science and logic-based problem solving into high school vocational and academic programs.
• Systems thinking in pedagogy: Porter’s cybernetic principles, emphasizing feedback loops and learning how to learn mirrored the mid-century shift toward student-centered, inquiry-based learning in Canadian public schools.
• Media literacy: Through his collaboration with Marshall McLuhan, Porter provided the hard science backing for media studies. This helped solidify media literacy as a core component of the Canadian English and Social Studies curriculum, teaching students to analyze the invisible systems of digital environments.

 

Contributions To The Global Systems Thinking Discipline

Porter was a key figure in the early global systems thinking movement by evolving cybernetics from a technical engineering tool into a wholistic framework for understanding society. He applied cybernetic principles such as feedback loops and control theory to non-mechanical fields like economics and biology. He belonged to the generation that built the tools and theories (the Differential Analyser and feedback math), that Jay Forrester decades later integrated into the formal discipline we now call System Dynamics.

As a key collaborator with Marshall McLuhan, Porter provided the scientific rigor for the Toronto School of Communication, framing technology and media as complex, interconnected systems that reshape human environments.

He revolutionized Industrial Engineering by shifting its focus toward human-machine systems. By integrating psychology and social variables into engineering, he established an interdisciplinary approach to technical education.

Through The Porter Commission on electric power planning, he applied systems thinking to public policy. He treated the electrical grid as a sociotechnical system balancing technical needs with environmental health and public opinion.

Porter’s legacy lies in the democratization of cybernetics, bridging the gap between the hard sciences and the humanities to better manage the large-scale, complex systems of the modern world.

 

Individual Learning & Projects

 

Apart from the first appearance of the word Cybernetics in a book title in the late 1940’s, it wasn’t until the late 1960’s that publicly available books included the term Systems Thinking or Systems Science in the title. For the first wave of pioneers, beyond thought engagements with the authors in their Personal Learning Sources, Learner Activities were predominantly via living engagements with other people, in organised academia or independent scholars. This included 1) people studying General Systems Theory, 2) people working in the pioneer’s primary discipline, 3) people from other disciplines building interdisciplinary systems thinking skills, and 4) people wanting to stay in tune with the growing Systems Thinking community taking shape.

This text uses the word engagement to mean “active involvement and interest”. The term living engagements here includes spoken conversations with another person or group of people and written conversations in academic or professional organisation publications. The living engagement may have been supportive or disputational in nature.

The Projects of these pioneers could include teaching undergraduate university students, teaching and conducting research with graduate/post-graduate university students, or conducting research in learning institutes/foundations. Projects for some of them involved constructing an information sharing network enabling the interdisciplinary communication to occur, or working in diverse business, government and non-government organisations outside academia. Some pioneers chose to work as much as possible outside organised academia and conducted socioculturally impacting projects as independent scholars.

Anchoring themselves in stable spousal relationships and home life enabled each pioneer to sustain day-to-day wellbeing as they evolved their systems thinking skills over many decades. As lifelong learners they remained exceptionally productive and fulfilled in and outside the formal academic setting for much of their lives.

The learner activities and projects listed below are intended as starting points for deeper dives into the full network of people with whom they engaged and the projects they conducted.

 

Learner Activities 

With whom did Arthur engage more frequently in the Systems Thinking community?

Norbert Wiener, Marshall McLuhan

With whom did Arthur engage more frequently in his discipline? 

Douglas Hartree, Vannevar Bush

 With whom did Arthur engage more frequently from other disciplines? 

Marshall McLuhan, John L. Atlee, Amory Lovins, F. Kenneth Hare, Donald Chant

 What role did Arthur’s spouse play in his engagements?

Porter referred to Patricia as a “wonderful consort” who backed him “at every move.” In the mid-20th-century academic and public policy world, the spouse often played a vital informal role acting as a trusted confidante, helping navigate institutional politics, and providing emotional and intellectual grounding during high-pressure assignments. While Patricia Porter was not a public figure on his commissions or engineering projects, she was the foundational partner whose management of their shared life and steady counsel made his demanding public and academic engagements possible.

 

Projects

Meccano Differential Analyser (1935)

Trans-Canada Computer-Controlled Air Traffic System (1957)

Canada’s First Biomedical Electronics & Systems Engineering Programs (established, 1958)

Expo 67 Advisory Committee on Science and Technology (chairman, 1967)

Cybernetics Simplified (1969)

Ontario Royal Commission on Electric Power Planning (chairman, 1980)

 

 

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