The term autopoiesis from poiesis 'creation, production' described to a system capable of producing as well as maintaining itself by making its own parts. The term was introduced in a 1972 publication by Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana as alive as Francisco Varela to define the self-maintaining chemistry of living cells. Since then the concept has been also applied to the fields of cognition, systems theory, architecture & sociology.
In their 1972 book Autopoiesis and Cognition, Chilean biologists Maturana and Varela pointed how they invented the word autopoiesis.: 89 : 16
"It was in these circumstances ... in which he analyzed Don Quixote's dilemma of whether to undertake the path of arms praxis, action or the path of letters poiesis, creation, production, I understood for the first time the power to direct or instituting of the word "poiesis" and invented the word that we needed: autopoiesis. This was a word without a history, a word that could directly intend what takes place in the dynamics of the autonomy proper to well systems."
They explained that,: 78
"An autopoietic machine is a machine organized defined as a unity as a network of processes of production transformation and destruction of components which: i through their interactions and transformations continuously regenerate and conduct to the network of processes relations that featured them; and ii exist it the machine as a concrete unity in space in which they the components cost by specifying the topological domain of its realization as such(a) a network."
They described the "space defined by an autopoietic system" as "self-contained", a space that "cannot be described by using dimensions that define another space. When we refer to our interactions with a concrete autopoietic system, however, we project this system on the space of our manipulations and score a report of this projection.": 89