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    Language is to Conversation as Air is to Breathing
    Paul Pangaro, May 6, 2009 /     situate.us workshop / Strategy Lab @ Ontario College of Art and Design

                                                                                                               Speaker's Notes

     

     

    So now let's say I'd like you to design this product for me, and you can have as many possibilities as you like, but you can only have 1 conversation in which to generate those possibilities. Would that be OK? No, I don't think you'd like that either. Because conversation delimits possibility.

    So the question then, is, what prevents conversation from being as rich in possibilty as it could be? This I would call "variety", that is, the range and depth of capabilities that are in the conversation.

    And where does variety come from in conversation? From the participants! In other words, participants delimit variety.

    And finally, the participants that I can bring into a conversation are delimited by my act of designing for conversation. If I don't design for conversation, I'm limiting my participants (relative to my goals), which limits variety, which limits conversation, which limits possibility. And that's where we started, wanting to have more than just a few possibilities when we design.

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    Personal thanks to Michael Dila of Torch Partnership Toronto for sponsoring the workshop and my participation.