Cover image: Conversation model, from Dubberly Design Office and Paul Pangaro, after Gordon Pask.
Presentation
After twisting dials and pushing buttons for a century, we tap at screens and holler at ‘bots all day long. But why? To attain our desires and intentions. Which come from where?
This talk declares conversation is the heart of interaction. Though we don’t talk to our finger as we tap away, we use it to point toward our goals. We aim and tap because of conversations we’ve had — with ourselves, with others, and now with machines. Without conversation, we can’t learn what’s possible or what we might want. From text and voice, to visuals and gestures, conversations give us possibilities, tradeoffs, and preferences.
So: conversations lead to the choices we make — the taps we decide we want. This talk argues that designing interfaces to foster conversation will enable the most powerful, ethical interactions. Principles, parables, cybernetic models, and implementations are used to make the case.
DownloadPPresentation Slidedeck
DownloadPAudio Recording of Presentation (45')
DownloadIxDA Pittsburgh Facebook Page
ViewCOLLOQUY 2018 Project Video on Vimeo
DownloadConversation is more than interface, IXDA 2017
DownloadThe Design of Ethical Interfaces, Seminar Series of the Human-Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon
DownloadBlog Posts on Conversation & Design
DownloadLinks about Designing for Conversation
ViewPangaro's RSD5 Video on Vimeo
Special thanks to Simon King, Karen Kornblum Berntsen, Hugh Dubberly, and Pooja Upadhyay.
Paul Pangaro joined the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University as Professor of Practice in January 2019. He has been designing conversational interfaces throughout his career, originally in the context of adaptive learning and “conversations with content” in text-based systems. He has worked with and within software startups in New York, Boston, and Silicon Valley in product and technology roles. As a consultant, Pangaro has been engaged by Du Pont, Nokia, Samsung, Instituto Itaú Cultural (São Paulo), Ogilvy & Mather, 8 Inc, and PoetryFoundation.org. His published papers explicate “designing for conversation" from his research and his implementations of software products and organizational processes. A current research project is to create a “Turning Test” where a machine judges if a conversation is intelligent. He recently completed a full-scale replication of Pask’s Colloquy of Mobiles with TJ McLeish at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit, where he was Chair and Associate Professor of the MFA Interaction Design program. Colloquy will be shown at Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2020 and thereafter enter the permanent collection of ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany. For more information see http://pangaro.com/.