Paul Pangaro

• Ph.D. Cybernetics (Brunel UK), B.S. Humanities/Computer Science (MIT)
• Visiting Scholar at Carnegie Mellon University

Today’s dominant search engines like Google rely on a mix of algorithmic signals and do not necessarily generate results ordered purely based on co-occurrences between keywords and concepts directly relevant to users. These factors may contribute to difficulties faced by high schoolers, college age students, and adults in comparing varied perspecti...

This poster, which comprises theoretical and empirical elements outlines Gordon Pask’s conversation theory and interaction of actors theory, that provide domain general frameworks to expose the mechanisms of both machine dependent and independent collective action. We first outline the historical foundations behind the development of Pask's two app...

This three-part paper presents Gordon Pask’s conversation theory (CT) and interaction of actors theory (IA) and outlines ways to apply these cybernetic approaches to designing technologies and scenarios for both formal and informal learning. The first part explains the concepts central to CT and IA, explaining the relationship between conceptual an...

Generative image AI has sparked heated discussion among creative professionals. However, how it might be a tool for design practice is understudied, and it is not yet understood how designers may find image AI helpful across the stages of design practice. To address this, our preliminary study explores how designers use generative image AI accompan...

Adopting a structure of themed and design-led Studios as framings for conversations for action, #NewMacy aims at enabling deep participation through activities such as prototyping, play, exploration, enactment, and improvisation. At RSD11, six #NewMacy Studios created opportunities to engage with interdisciplinary approaches to systemic design thro...

Essays, photo-essays, interviews, manifestos, diagrams, and a play explore the varied legacies, influences, and futures of the Bauhaus. What would keep the Bauhaus up at night if it were practicing today? A century after its founding by Walter Gropius in Weimar, Germany, as an “experimental laboratory of the future,” who are the pioneering experime...

Ranulph Glanville came to believe that cybernetics and design are two sides of the same coin. The authors present their understanding of Glanville and the relationships they see between cybernetics and design. They argue that cybernetics is a necessary foundation for twenty-first century design practice: If design, then systems: Due in part to the...

Through early childhood experiences and then recollections of the many cyberneticians he knew in the 1970s and 1980s, the author traces his personal trajectory toward interaction design and cybernetics. He moves from fascination with technology, through disillusionment about Artificial Intelligence, to seeing that living in cybernetics is a journey...

Purpose In an ideal situation, the author would like to answer each of the following questions: What is Conversation? What is Theory? What is Conversation Theory, anyhow? How did it arise? Who participated? How is it a theory? Where did it end up? Is it interesting? How might it be useful? Where has it been applied? Why should you care? What does...

CYBERNETICS: STATE OF THE ART is the first volume of the book series CON-VERSATIONS. Driven by cybernetic thinking, it engages with pressing questions for architecture, urban planning, design and automated infrastructure; in an age of increasing connectivity, AI and robotization and an evolutionary state of the Anthropocene - perpetuating angst-rid...

The roles of art, design, and architecture on long-duration human space missions could have deep, significant impact on the functional capabilities of human environments in space, far beyond mere form and aesthetics. Yet, today's technology-driven paradigm of space design pays limited attention to " soft " disciplines that relate to artistic and de...

For over half a century space exploration has been dominated by engineering and technology driven practices. This paradigm leaves limited room for art and design. Yet in other parts of our lives, art and design play important roles: they stimulate new ideas and connect people to their experiences and to each other at a deeper level, while affecting...

For over half a century space exploration has been dominated by engineering and technology driven practices. This paradigm leaves limited room for art and design. Yet in other parts of our lives, art and design play important roles: they stimulate new ideas and connect people to their experiences and to each other at a deeper level, while affecting...

Digitised media channels have given brands unparalleled opportunities to engage consumers in conversation. Here the authors propose a strict definition of conversation and its elements, in order to show prior limitations of consumer engagement and as a guide to deeper and more fulfilling interactions for all participants. To date, even though the m...

Marketing performance depends heavily on the level of consumer engagement with the product or brand. Traditional means to engaging consumers rely on one-to-many communication channels allowing for very limited consumer feedback. With digital convergence, however, the transition from communication to conversation becomes not only economical for the...

Systems Engineering focuses on the design of a system, and Cybernetics focuses on understanding communication and control in designed and natural systems. In Systems Engineering, views of a system are typically represented in SysML in terms of Requirements, Structure, Behavior, and Parametrics. By supporting the analysis of constraints on subsystem...

This short dedication to Heinz emphasizes the notions of recursion and learning, second- order cybernetics and ethics as expressed and embodied by von Foerster. These notions act as constant clarifiers in the daily efforts of the author to design software applications or to support others as they steer their own design processes.

Contains reports on seven research projects.

Editor's Note: Improving healthcare is a wicked problem [1]. Healthcare's many stakeholders can't agree on a solution, because they don't agree on the problem. They come to the discussion from different points of view, with different frames. Wicked problems can be "solved" only by reframing, by providing a new way of understanding the problem that...

For those engaged in the discipline of cybernetics, its relationship to business has long been discussed and desired. The recent explosion of digital communication channels affords an application domain for cybernetics that is itself potentially highly productive yet clearly in need of guidance. While Web 2.0 experiments abound, failure rather than...

The innovative mobile technologies mediate, enables and spreads our conversations across divergences of time, space, and experience. These devices are easy to handle as compared to computers as these are wireless devices and are kept always with the individuals. The devices are seamlessly connected to the human network and are much more biological....

Conversation, its design, models and usefulness of interaction design has been discussed. Conversation is a progression of exchanges among precipitants and a highly complex type of interaction is quite powerful. Claude Shannon has developed a rigorous model of a transmission channel used to convey messages between an information source and a destin...

Ashby's 1952 work Design for a Brain comprises a formal description of the necessary and sufficient conditions for a system to act ‘like a brain,’ that is, to learn in order to remain viable in a changing environment, and to ‘get what it wants.’ Remarkably, Ashby gives a complete, formal specification of such a system without any dependency on how...

Prologue: In the summer of 2008, I locked myself away in a secluded, secret location and wrote a book. My publisher didn't like it. "Boring," he said. Boring! Me? So I rewrote the beginning, which I present here to you. (Interested readers can find the ...

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Effective conversation occurs when beliefs are negotiated through interaction and evolve in a framework of goals. Concurrently, goals are negotiated and evolve through interaction. Such conversations are processes of design. Similarly, design—where proposed constructions are negotiated and evolve toward goals, while goals for the design are negotia...

Effective conversation occurs when beliefs are negotiated through interaction and evolve via goals. Concurrently, goals are negotiated and evolve through interaction. Such conversations are processes of design. Similarly, design—where proposed constructions are negotiated and evolve toward goals, while goals for the design are negotiated and evolve...

Purpose This paper aims to describe relationships between cybernetics and design, especially service design, which is a component of service‐craft; to frame cybernetics as a language for design, especially behavior‐focused design. Design/methodology/approach The material in this paper was developed for a course on cybernetics and design. Work bega...

Abstract - “Drama” derives its meaning from the Greek “dran” [delta-roe-alpha-nu], “to act, to do” and, in so many ways, Pask has always been about acting and the “dramatic”[1]. When I say acting I do not want only to refer to Pask's performances - lecturer, researcher, client-dazzler, theatrical impresario or human being, all of which are intertwi...

In this paper, the author revisits his excitement in learning Pask’s conversation theory that gave immediate prescriptions for the construction of training systems and adaptive, personalized information browsers. Named after Pask’s first implementation of an interactive knowledge structuring tool, the THOUGHTSTICKER system described here came to ma...

The authors have constructed a workstation-based system to train nuclear power plant operators in the proper execution of emergency operating procedures (EOPs). This emergency operating procedure support system (EOP-SS) consists of three interacting modules: (1) an EOP modeler that captures the reasoning associated with the correct execution of one...

Three generally accepted facts are:1. Computers are getting cheap and fast enough to do cost-effective graphics on line and in real time;2. The future of computer graphics is in raster scan;3. Computer animation is emerging as a volatile art form and as a medium for scientific communication.Concurrently, we find computer animation somewhat polluted...