On this site you will find posts related to Design, Conversation, Interaction Design, and Cybernetics, often together in recombinations.
My Vimeo channels include Design + Conversation, Cybernetics, and alternatives to Design Thinking.
The foundational ideas of “Design + Conversation” are:
- “Design for Conversation” = Conversation is the most powerful human-to-human interaction, and therefore the focus of design should be to enable conversation, and
- “Design as Conversation” = Design itself is a conversational process.
These ideas are elaborated in this paper co-authored with Hugh Dubberly.
The early postings on this site are from the time I was Chair of the masters program in Interaction Design at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit from April 2015 through 2018. Those posts chronicle courses and projects from that program as well as content deemed important to the students in the program. Sometimes the purpose of the post was to introduce work available in their original form at pangaro.com, including relevant work from my career in cybernetics and interaction design.
You will also find my bio and additional contact information at Carnegie Mellon University.
About the site logo
The icons in the site logo were a synopsis of the theme of a proposal prepared by the MIT Architecture Machine group in 1976. Called “Graphical Conversation Theory”, the proposal attempted to outline a research program that would apply Gordon Pask’s Conversation Theory to interfaces between humans and machines.
The black rows of icons represent, respectively: a person (round icon) interacting with a machine (square icon); a person interacting through a machine networked to another machine interacting with a person; and a machine, with full agency and capacity to converse, interacting through a machine to a person.
The cover was designed by Muriel Cooper of the MIT Visible Language Workshop and executed by Ron MacNeil with embossing.
The proposal was not funded.
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