Search results

Discusses the relation between cybernetics and architecture and pays tribute to Gordon Pask’s role and influence. Indicates Pask’s contribution to an increasingly environmentally responsive architectural theory that may lead to a more humane and ecologically conscious environment.

Pask’s great contribution to cybernetics is to take seriously the notion of interaction in the circular processes that lie at the heart of the subject. From his earliest days he worked with interactive systems. His master work, conversation theory, epitomises the interactive system, which he then extended and generalised into the interaction of actors theory. In this paper, the requirements that conversation places on our understanding of participants is presented in the form of a specification. In particular, the ways of behaving and the assumptions under which we have to behave if we are to be able to converse with success are expounded. These are in great contrast to neo‐Darwinian assumptions. The difference between communication by code and communication by conversation is explored, and the primacy of conversational communication is argued. Finally, it is claimed that the ways of behaving and the assumptions that are the requirements for a conversation to take place are presented as personal qualities that were particularly apparent in Pask himself.

Here I recall fondly times spent with Gordon and acknowledge his influence on my ideas and work.

The purpose of this paper is to study a series of exchanges between cybernetics and the arts, focusing on Pask's lifelong envisioning of the so‐called information environment (I.E). It follows the author's previous PhD dissertation which was concerned with the exchanges between systems research and architecture; Gordon Pask et al.; and a couple of outstanding architectural projects related to systems and computation.

This paper was mainly supported by archival research of Gordon Pask's Archive (held at the time by his daughter) and Cedric Price's Archive (held at the Canadian Centre for Architecture); supplemented with interviews and bibliographical research (research was made possible by a FCT grant – POCI 2010).

The paper details and discusses exchanges between the fields of cybernetics and the arts; and it focuses on Pask's lifelong exchange with architecture and the manifestation of his ideas in this field. One highlights, among others, Pask's exchanges within the British milieu and the AMG during the 1960s and 1970s; the seminal manifestations of his main C2 achievement – the Conversation Theory – in the field of architecture; and his later architectural performance.

The previous primary archival research conducted at Pask's daughter house, is being expanded by the author through use of new material.

This paper is intended for historians of sciences and the arts. It briefly overviews Pask's well‐known main works and, in addition, it includes reference to some rare little‐known materials.

The present paper sketches the way Gordon Pask has influenced our lives as human beings and intellectuals. The first part refers to some of our memories of Gordon Pask as a most remarkable person, a kind of mix between gentleman and Bohemian. The second part tries to overview how Gordon Pask and cybernetics in general inspired, on the one hand, our thinking on a category of poets and writers we label “absolute writers” and, on the other hand, the making of music and our thinking about making music. We have concentrated on these artistic aspects to show how many‐sided Gordon Pask’s influence on people really was.

Approaches Pask’s conversation theory from a sociological perspective. Pask’s vision of conversation as a self‐organising process can help our understanding of the emergence of social order out of social interaction. Through conversation, human beings would be able to construct a shared reality which would be the common setting of their social life. But modern societies are only partially based on conversational interaction. Many of their structural traits are not a result of conversational agreements, but of the unintended consequences of conscious (inter)actions. In these societies, the main source of social order at the macro level is not intentional action, but the dissipation of intentional action. This phenomenon generates the dissipative structures that represent the objective frame of social life. The main purpose of this paper is to review the theoretical work of Gordon Pask from a sociological point of view, in order to appraise its potential as an instrument adequate for social analysis.

This paper reviews the contributions of Gordon Pask, cybernetician, to the discipline of psychology as a methodologist and as a theoretician. Pask was prolific in many fields but especially so in psychology both as an innovative experimenter and an innovative theorist. Over four decades, Pask carried out experimental studies of learning, problem solving and decision making, often using sophisticated computer‐based environments. These latter, in turn, inspired the design of teaching machines and learning environments with practical applications in education and training. Pask’s theorizing while addressing detailed methodological and conceptual issues was also holistic and unifying in intent, not least in his proposals for rapprochements between process, individual and social psychologies.

The most satisfying and interesting human learning game‐of‐life is probably a conversation where there is a common will among the participants to promote understanding of our world despite possibly large differences in knowledge and experience. Gordon Pask took conversational learning as more than a general metaphor for humanly significant learning. He identified the essential minimal characteristics of the entities and relationships involved and formalised all that into a recursive learning theory of very broad scope. Over the years, Pask and his various System Research associates validated conversation theory by embodying it in a number of (n‐) person‐machine systems (SAKI, CASTE, THOUGHTSTICKER, TDS, etc.), and by doing case studies with various kinds of learners and tutor‐learners learning and teaching through these interfaces. Reviews some interesting aspects of conversation theory, including both its remarkable insights and some limitations. Concludes that there are good reasons for expecting that the implications of Pask’s approach to educational cybernetics will continue to be explored for many years to come.