Cover image: Conversation model, from Dubberly Design Office and Paul Pangaro, after Gordon Pask.
Presentation & Workshop
The design of human-machine interactions is certain to be difficult: How can we safely couple our subjective analog selves to the deterministic digital whirlings of today’s computers? With their dazzling speed and incomprehensible panopticon of their data, we are bound to be overwhelmed. And so it is with today’s AI: We are subjugated by a new class of pandemic in the form of digital manipulations of our privacy, our attention, our emotions, and our way of living harmoniously together. What paths can we forge as designers and entrepreneurs, teachers and students, to swing the sensibility of our machine interactions back to our biological and social selves? And how can we do this ethically?
This talk proposes we design digital interfaces that enable the agency that comes with human-to-human conversation. The rich interactions of conversation engender the relationships and trust that are necessary foundations for collaboration and governance. Bringing conversation to human-machine interaction has the potential to give each individual person a new degree of participation in value creation for individual and collective benefit.
Yet conversation may occur in many forms other than speech or text exchange. Conversational frameworks are not new to human-machine interaction design. Conversational machines predate today's voice agents and chatbots by a surprising 70 years. From a strand of this history we can weave pragmatic yet rigorous and executable practices for a new generation of conversational interface design, and develop alternatives to the algorithms that distort our lives every hour.
This talk hopes to open our imaginations to designing for human-machine conversation via analog frameworks that don’t need our literal voices—yet are fully ready to hear us speak, with all the human meaning, connection, and richness that conversation can bring.
Download#NewMacy 2021: Responding to Pandemics of “Today’s AI”
DownloadConversation is more than interface, IXDA 2017
ViewCOLLOQUY 2018 Project Video on Vimeo
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
Paul Pangaro is Professor of the Practice in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University and President of the American Society for Cybernetics. His career spans startups, teaching, performance, and consulting. He has been applying models of conversation to interaction design and organizational design since his Ph.D. in Cybernetics (Brunel UK) with Gordon Pask. His researching and making is grounded in the twin concepts of “design for conversation” and “design as conversation.” He is currently leading the #NewMacy initiative in response to the pandemic of today’s AI algorithms. His work can be found at http://pangaro.com/.