Why Design is Conversation and Why Conversation for Every Design
To understand conversation is to understand how we learn about the world and how we communicate and collaborate with others. Products and services can benefit from a better understanding of conversation. Designers benefit from understanding conversation better, because they can design for better conversations.
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:
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”
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).
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?
Let’s imagine we are the catalyst for starting a new project, some design challenge relating to a new app.
First, we all recognize the value of the participants in a conversation. We all experience the improvement in thinking and outcomes when we work with someone else. This seems to say, “more participants means better outcomes”—hah, you know that’s not such a good idea. Too many voices, too much distraction. So, how would we decide whom to have in that first conversation?
The title of this post and the diagram comes from Hugh Dubberly and his slidedeck about how design is centered on models and conversation and politics. Not kidding.
Continue reading ““How to engage designers to ensure great products””
This is a useful review by Jonathen Franzen called “Sherry Turkle’s ‘Reclaiming Conversation’”, about Turkle’s new book.