Why Design is Conversation and Why Conversation for Every Design
I believe that by bringing together design and science we can produce a rigorous but flexible approach that will allow us to explore, understand and contribute to science in an antidisciplinary way. — Joi Ito
Joi Ito, director of the MIT Media Lab, is starting a new journal with MIT Press and MIT Libraries called Design and Science. His introductory post takes the stand that science suffers from narrow vocabularies that create silos of thinking and restrict rich collaboration.
The paper “Cybernetics and Design: Conversations for Action” [PDF] has recently gone to print in a peer-reviewed journal. It offers a rationale for the position that design is conversation; perhaps a surprising idea, but the logic in the paper is rigorous. Cybernetics offers a foundation for 21st-century design practice, here is the core of it:
Given vast changes in society and technology in the past 50 years, what will designers do differently today?
Quite a mouthful, that title, but it’s an excellent summary: The connections across those domains are so rich and with so many shared influences, it becomes clear that the history of interaction design—and also its future—is bound up in systems and cybernetics, cultural politics and personalities.
Continue reading “How cybernetics connects computing, counterculture, and design”
When we understand something—let’s say a concept, like a table—we have some formulation of that “in our head”. That formulation is something we can manipulate while we’re thinking or conversing or acting.
We converse every day—so why would we need a model of conversation? (First, you might want to review something about models.)
If you want to improve something—that is, engage in an act of designing—then it’s extremely helpful to understand well what it is your trying to improve. So, if you’re trying to improve conversation—whether in an organization or team or service or app—then it’s useful to have a model of conversation.
Gordon Pask spent his entire career building immersive experiences, teaching machines (only some examples in this PDF), experimental studies, and a theory of conversation (but here’s a simplified presentation).
Models—good ones, anyway—are valuable in a number of ways.
The best resource I know on the topic is the paper Models of Models by Hugh Dubberly.
My talk at the MWUX Conference, Pittsburgh, October 2015 was an opportunity to present a proposal with rationale for the “literacies” that are required by IxD practitioners:
“Designing for Conversation” is a rich phrase with multiple interpretations—does it mean, designing to foster conversation? Why would that be a good thing?