Why Design is Conversation and Why Conversation for Every Design
After its opening run at Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, “Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia” has moved to its second location, Cranbrook Art Museum. Curated by Andrew Blauvelt, this installation has focus and intensity.
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).
When we talk about “interaction” and “interaction design”, there is a presumption or a hope that the interactions will be valuable, interesting, engaging—maybe even stronger than all that: that the interaction will be compelling. What can make an interaction compelling? It may be helpful to look back at historically important interaction designs, so we’re not blinded by the amazing technology we have today.