FORUM ON MODELING

EDITOR Hugh Dubberly [e-mail]

municated desire or intention. Conversations
for design must reflect and preserve the posi-
tions and contributions of multiple participants
included (and excluded) in the model of change.
By “merely” speaking, the designer creates a
context for the relative inclusion of stakehold-
ers or users, an ethic explicitly revealed by his
or her conversational model. By extension of
this assumption, the way we converse may also
be seen as, perhaps unwittingly, reflecting our
working philosophy of designing.
Several implicit models of conversation can be
identified that guide participation in very dif-
ferent ways. Three epistemological orientations
include the rational, pragmatic, and phenomeno-
logical.
The rational perspective may be viewed as an
instrumental and purposive individual commu-
nications system used by designers to achieve
sophisticated design outcomes. Conversation
can be understood as a set of patterns employed
as skillful means in facilitating the relationship
between designers, stakeholders, and product or
materials. This is the mainstream perspective
in our technological culture, and perhaps the
way most readers view conversation in design.
This perspective is observable in practices that
employ a well-defined set of methods and com-
munications with every problem situation.
A pragmatic perspective considers design
an inherently communicative practice, where
design activities enact the creation of a linguistic
system of meanings applicable to a problem in
context. In practice, we create a unique coupling
of appropriate language to the design situation,
following stakeholders and their lifeworlds rather
than promoting our own language of design.
When we customize design methods to suit a
particular purpose, rather than pull methods “off
the shelf,” we reveal a pragmatic philosophy.

[ 6] Winograd, T. and Flores, F. Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for Design. Boston, MA: Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing, 1987.

Conversation as Designable Action
Readers of interactions and Communications of the
ACM may be familiar with Winograd and Flores’s
(1986) LAP work [ 6]. Flores demonstrated suc-
cesses in software (The Coordinator and Action
Workflow), education (Logonet and Landmark),
and management (Business Design) based on
an integral philosophical system. While LAP’s
critique of the artificial intelligence field had an
Three Orientations Three Orientations
Orientation
Rational
Pragmatic
Phenomenological

Relationships
Conversation as a tool
Design as conversation
Activity embodied in language

Methods
1st-gen design methods
Methods standardized
2nd-gen design methods
Methods customized to context
Ethnomethodology, “Design for...”
Products seen as conversations

January + February 2010

Influences

Bruner, Simon
Systems, engineering
Peirce, Rittel
Human-centered design
Heidegger, Varela
Generative design