and the presence of anthropologists Mead and Bateson in the Macy meetings. The Biological Computer Laboratory, founded in 1958 and active until the mid-1970s under the direction of Heinz von Foerster at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, was a major incubator of this trend in cybernetics research.

Focuses of the second wave of cybernetics included management cybernetics, such as Stafford Beer's