Gordon Pask

28 June 1928, Derby, England – 29 March 1996, London, England (aged 67)

British cybernetician who built some of the first adaptive teaching machines and interactive artworks, and developed conversation theory, an account of learning and understanding as conversation between participants.

Life

Pask studied natural sciences at Downing College, Cambridge, with an interest in physiology and psychology. There he met Stafford Beer and, through reading Norbert Wiener, found cybernetics. In 1953 he founded System Research Ltd, a small company in Richmond, Surrey, that for decades did experimental work on learning, teaching machines and human-machine interaction, much of it for government and military clients.

He held academic posts at Brunel University and the Architectural Association in London, and visiting positions at the University of Illinois (at Heinz von Foerster’s Biological Computer Laboratory), Concordia University in Montreal and the University of Amsterdam. He was famous for his Edwardian dress, nocturnal working hours and dazzling, difficult conversation.

Influences

Wiener’s Cybernetics gave him a field; Beer was a lifelong friend and collaborator; McCulloch was an early supporter of his machines. Von Foerster drew him into second-order cybernetics, and the logician George Spencer-Brown, who lodged with the Pask family for a time, influenced his thinking on distinctions.

Contributions

Musicolour (1953) was a light show that listened to a performer and got bored if they repeated themselves, so the performer and machine learned together. His SAKI keyboard trainer adapted its pace to each learner, an early adaptive teaching machine. Colloquy of Mobiles, shown at the Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition in London in 1968, was a set of mobiles that courted each other with light, and that visitors could join.

His central theory, conversation theory, holds that understanding is produced in conversation between participants (people, or people and machines) who agree on concepts by explaining them back to each other. It informed educational technology, and through Paul Pangaro and others, interaction design. With the architect Cedric Price and the theatre director Joan Littlewood he worked on the Fun Palace, an unbuilt building designed to reconfigure itself around its users.

Why it matters today

Pask’s insistence that real conversation requires agreement and the ability to explain back is a sharp test for chatbots that produce fluent language without either. His interactive works are recognised as forerunners of responsive architecture and interaction design.

Further reading

  • Gordon Pask, An Approach to Cybernetics (1961)
  • Gordon Pask, Conversation Theory (1976)
  • Andrew Pickering, The Cybernetic Brain (2010), chapter 7

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