FORUM ON MODELING

the weather), “creating a shared background as a
basis for future interpretation of conversations.”
The intent of this so-called phatic communica-
tion is merely acknowledgement.
Conversations for possibility include interper-
sonal queries, inquiries, and propositions that
“open a context.” Winograd notes the importance
of common ground (background), including prior
intent, upon which speakers can instantiate new
contexts for conversation. There are no “goals” in
conversations for possibility, but rather the co-
construction of understanding and novelty.
A conversation can be observed as moving
through progression of stages, where an opening
affords the potential for action. The coordina-
tion of action requires meeting what Searle calls
conditions of satisfaction [ 8]. Conditions may
include some agreed outcome, and agreements
about necessary quality and future dates. While
some may consider these conditions goals, LAP
does not refer to goals in the objective sense .
This difference is crucial, as LAP suggests that
we honor the commitment, as if spoken between
persons, not the objectives.
This model has much in common with the dis-
covery orientation in design practice. Designers
are taught to “challenge the brief” and to help cli-
ents reformulate a problem as given so that the
right framing of a problem is adopted in a design
project. The skills for mediating conversations
for possibility are learned through the experi-
ence of navigating different frames of possible
visions or outcomes in conversation. Other dis-
tinct “conversations for” that were not proposed
in LAP show in a designing context, as they occur
as patterns of sense-making between committed
participants. Conversations for understanding (or
dialogue) and for clarification (convergence) are
two that might be further distinguished.
Moving the “right possibility” toward a con-
versation for action is another embodied skill.
The ability to move stakeholders in social design
situations is not seen as a rhetorical, persuasive
skill, but one that turns on what Searle identi-
fies as illocutionary force. This is the extent to
which action is performed by words, not by the
semantic content, but by the speaker’s intent.
The variable capacity to move together toward
action is embodied by the speaker at the time of
utterance. This distinction is inherent in LAP’s
formulation of ontological design—design actions
are co-created by speaker and listener at the
time of conversation in a mutual grounding of
understanding and agreement.

Learning from The Coordinator

A 2006 issue of Communications recapped the lan-
guage/action perspective, but it included no men-
tion of the early email activity management sys-
tem released by Flores in 1986. The Coordinator
was (primarily) designed for ultimately manag-
ing conversations for action, by instantiating
requests, offers, counter-offers, promises, and
other commitments as mediated transactions.
These illocutionary points were identified in
Flores’s earlier research on effective business
conversations in the workplace, and were formu-
lated in his notion that “organizations exist as
networks of directives and commissives.”
Early email systems followed a slow adoption
curve, given the limitations of computing and
networks. Free-form email was initially perceived
to be unnecessarily constrictive, a “cold” medi-
um that was not at all conversational. During the
years The Coordinator was available, early con-
ventional email systems were used for sporadic
and discretionary communications. The ubiqui-
tous acceptance of email required a span of five
years to alter communicative practices, even in
dedicated organizations. While The Coordinator
did not fit the cognitive style or tasks of exist-
ing organizations, even unstructured electronic
communications were fraught with resistance
and halting advances. Since The Coordinator also
required a commitment to managing accountable
communications, its use was limited to fairly
small and dedicated networks.
The design and flaws of The Coordinator might
still teach us about structuring conversations
and accountable communicative actions. Perhaps
the system’s intent was, as Lucy Suchman said,
“to remedy the carelessness of organization
members regarding their commitments to each
other through a technologically based system of
intention-accounting” [ 9]. Yet this critique focus-
es on the functions of The Coordinator, as origi-
nally designed. Speech act theory was certainly
not perfectly matched to the intended domains
of conversation. Searle’s explicitly-described
theory does not preordain a “rationalist” imple-
mentation. As a conversation theory, it retains
constructive power for formulating social (and

[ 8] Searle, J. R. “A Taxonomy of Illocutionary Acts.” In K. Gunderson (Ed.), Language, Mind and Knowledge, 344-369. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1975.

[ 9] Suchman, L. “Do Categories have politics? The Language/ Action Perspective Reconsidered.” Proceedings of the Third Conference on European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work. Milan, Italy, 1–14, 1993.

January + February 2010