Interactions - January/February 2010

FORUM ON MODELING

therefore design) commitments as acts by their
very communication.
One can agree with the underpinning concern
of Suchman’s critique while identifying signifi-
cant exceptions. For one, regulated organizations
could benefit from Searlean communication by
filtering today’s overwhelming volumes of data
by displaying information by action: requests,
commitments, dates, and implicit promises to
network participants.
LAP-structured conversations might enhance
communications in complex, high-reliability
organizations. Winograd’s 1987 case study of
hospital conversation flow foresaw the usability
nightmare of electronic medical records systems.
In regulated environments the coordination of
commitments is as important as data quality.
In operations such as health care, transporta-
tion, and the military, the ability to manage and
respond to commitments fosters operational
resiliency by managing actions that occur “as
speech,” such as orders, responses, announce-
ments, and outcomes. The entire chain of com-
mitments following a medication order would be
tracked as a directive conversation, rather than
as “workflow.” It instantiates a process based
on verbs, action, rather than nouns and objects.
While Google’s adoption of the “conversation” as
a unit of communication appears to build on this
perspective, in practice, few email threads are
true conversations. The meaningful verbs that
prompt action are hidden in today’s electronic
communications.
While The Coordinator software passed into
collective memory without further enhance-
ment, Winograd and Flores’s bold experiment
in organizing communication should be evalu-
ated from an innovation perspective. Consider
the audacity of introducing a dedicated, tightly
structured email system in the late 1980s. As an
early adopter, I found its most significant diffi-
culty was the macrocognitive problem of its lack
of organizational fit (as suggested by Suchman’s
critique) and the necessity of changing commu-
nicative practices. For it (or any email system) to
be of value, all participants in an action network
had to agree to use it consistently.

toring of commitment. As Web-based systems
have greatly enabled the ability to collaborate,
people are easily overloaded by multiple commu-
nication channels. Managing commitment and
attention remains the weak link in our technol-
ogy panorama. A conversation design perspec-
tive can enhance our coordination of attention as
well as action.
With respect to The Coordinator, I would make
the personal observation that successful soft-
ware systems are rarely treated as newsworthy
in scholarly publications, and failures are typi-
cally ignored. Successful software products are
discussed only peripherally. With no venue for
cooperative constructive critique of social and
interactive artifacts, we collectively risk losing
the value of learning from the wisdom embod-
ied in such artifacts and their adoption by real
users. We also suffer the loss of shared mean-
ing from collective memory by not sustaining
an academic tradition of a balanced interpretive
review and critique of artifacts we design and
endorse. Perhaps interactions might host such a
critique as a shared conversation toward creating
a critical discourse, in support of creating a con-
structive shared memory.
Finally, the emerging perspective of purpo-
sive design—“designing for” (e.g. sustainability,
thrivability, transformation, care)—shares an
ontological basis with “conversation for” in terms
of intentionality and social teleology. When
designing for a purpose, our “conversation for”
that purpose brings it forth, a distinctly different
view from a design method perspective. These
and other proposals ought to be considered in
the emerging reconfigurations of design thinking
and practice.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Peter Jones, Ph.D. founded the Redesign innovation research firm in 2001, and conducts independent and client-based research. Redesign, specializes in information and process strategies for scientific, organizational and healthcare practices. Jones is writing

Design for Care (Rosenfeld Media, 2010), exploring how new design thinking is transforming healthcare. He resides in Toronto, where he is on faculty at Ontario College of Art and Design. Find him at designdialogues.com.