Gordon Pask
Andrew Gordon Speedie Pask was a British cybernetician, inventor and polymath who made multiple contributions to cybernetics, educational psychology, educational technology, applied epistemology, chemical computing, architecture, and systems art. During his life, he gained three doctorate degrees. He was an avid writer, with more than two hundred and fifty publications which included a variety of journal articles, books, periodicals, patents, and technical reports. He worked as an academic and researcher for a variety of educational settings, research institutes, and private stakeholders including but not limited to the University of Illinois, Concordia University, the Open University, Brunel University and the Architectural Association School of Architecture.
He is known for the development of conversation theory, which is a pedagogical, cybernetic and dialectical account for how two conversational participants who attempt to converse with each other in such a way to achieve a shared understanding amongst themselves as to the significance of a given topic.
Biography
Early life and education: 1928–1958
Pask was born in Derby, England, on 28 June 1928, to his parents Percy and Mary Pask. His father was a partner in Pask, Cornish and Smart, a wholesale fruit business in Covent Garden. He had two older siblings: Alfred, who trained as an engineer before becoming a Methodist minister, and Edgar, a professor of anesthetics. His family moved to the Isle of Wight shortly after his birth. He was educated at Rydal Penrhos. According to Andrew Pickering and G. M. Furtado Cardoso Lopes, school taught Pask to "be a gangster" and he was noted for having designed bombs during his time at Rydal Penrhos which was delivered to a government ministry in relation to the war effort during the Second World War. He later went on to complete two diplomas in Geology and Mining Engineering from Liverpool Polytechnic and Bangor University respectively.Pask later attended Cambridge University around 1949 to study for a bachelor's degree, where he met his future associate and business partner Robin McKinnon-Wood, who was studying his undergraduate in Maths and Physics at the time. At the time, Pask was living in Jordan's Yard, Cambridge under the supervision of the scientist and engineer John Brickell. During this time, Pask was more known for his work in the arts and musical theatre rather than his later pursuits in science and education. He became interested in cybernetics and information theory in the early 1950s when Norbert Wiener was asked to give a presentation on the subject for the university.
He eventually obtained an MA in natural sciences from the university in 1952, and met his future wife Elizabeth Pask around this time at the birthday party of a mutual friend when she was studying at Liverpool University and he was visiting his father in Wallasey, Merseyside. They married in 1956 and later had two daughters together.
Beginning of System Research Ltd: 1953–1961
In 1953, along with his wife Elizabeth and Robin McKinnon-Wood, Pask formally founded the organization System Research Ltd., in Richmond, Surrey. According to McKinnon-Wood, his and Pask's early forays in musical comedy production at Cambridge through their earlier company Sirelelle laid the groundwork for his later company which they viewed as being "wholly consistent with the development of self-adaptive systems, self-organizing systems, man-machine interactions etc". After rebranding the company as System Research Ltd., the company became non-profit in 1961 with significant funding coming from the United States Army and Airforce.Throughout the company's existence, it conducted a variety of research and development initiatives on behalf of civil service organizations and research councils in both the United States and the United Kingdom. During the active period of System Research Ltd., he and his associates worked on a number of projects including SAKI, MusiColour, and finally educational technologies such as CASTE and Thoughtsticker.
During this period, Pask and McKinnon-Wood were asked to demonstrate their proof of concept for MusiColour on behalf of Billy Butlin. While the machine initially worked when the duo sought to demonstrate the technology to Butlin's deputy, after his arrival "it exploded in a cloud of white smoke", due to McKinnon-Wood "buying junk electronic capacitors". The duo managed to restart the machine; after which McKinnon-Wood purports Butlin to have remarked if such a machine could withstand an explosion like that, it must be reliable.
Stafford Beer also claims to have met Pask sometime during this period at a dinner party in Sheffield, and notes of both his genius, the difficulty in following his thought, and getting hold of; remarking both that " conception of things is not anyone else's perception of things", and that "The man can be quite infuriating". Between the early to mid-1950s, Pask began to develop electrochemical devices designed to find their own "relevance criteria". Pask performed experiments utilizing "electrochemical assemblages, passing current through various aqueous solutions of metallic salts in order to construct an analog control system". During the late 1950s, Pask managed to get a prototype device working. Oliver Selfridge noted that it was the second such mechanism, whereby "a machine build a machine electronically without any physical motion", actually worked.
In September 1958 in Namur, Belgium, he attended the second International Congress of Cybernetics. Pask was first introduced to Heinz von Foerster during this time, who were both informed by the attendees of the conference of having submitted similar papers. After searching for Pask through the streets of Namur, von Foerster described his first observation of Pask as that of a "leprechaun in a black double-breasted jacket over a white shirt with a black bow tie, puffing a cigarette through a long cigarette holder, and fielding questions, always with a polite smile, that were tossed at him from all directions". von Foerster later asked Pask to join him at the Biological Computer Laboratory at the University of Illinois; subsequently describing him after his death as both being difficult and yet a genius. He also this year produced SAKI for the instruction and development of keyboard skills aimed at the commercial marketplace.
His former research assistant Bernard Scott argues that "The Mechanisation of Thought Processes" conference at the National Physics Laboratory in Teddington, London represented a critical point in the development of Pask's thinking: It was here Pask first published his paper "Physical Analogues to the Growth of a Concept" which contained a theoretical discussion on how the "growth of crystals electrodes suspended in an electronic solution", could be used to represent in purely physical phenomenon the growth of a concept. Warren McCulloch wrote in relation to the presentation that: " gadget does work; it does "take habits" by a mechanism that Charles Peirce proposed". During the later years of this period, Pask had begun to describe himself as a mechanic philosopher to emphasize both the theoretical and experimental aspects of his role.
Later period of System Research Ltd: 1961–1978
During the 1960s, Pask worked significantly with psychologist B. N. Lewis and computer scientist G. L. Mallen. In 1961, Pask published An Approach to Cybernetics. According to Ranulph Glanville, the work argued in favour of the notion that cybernetics was at its heart the art of creating defensible metaphors; this being in reference to the cross-disciplinary nature of the early cybernetics movement, which specifically stressed how analogous forms of control and communication could be found operating between disciplines.Mallen joined System Research Ltd., in 1964 as a research associate on a project to analyse decision-making in crime investigation. This led to the development of SIMPOL, which was an information management game. Results from the project were reported back to the home office and were believed by Mallen to have had some impact on policy decisions taken by the police. Mallen described Gordon as "a great gadgeteer and had built adaptive teaching machines, for example, to train teleprinter operators, and he used these as a way into understanding human skill learning processes". Mallen suggests that also during this year, Pask presented a lecture to Ealing College of Art on system theory and cybernetics. He writes this influenced several students there, and represented a general ethos in the 1960s regarding the breaking of disciplinary boundaries for which Systems Research Ltd., became a central convergence point. One notable project Pask became involved with involved the Fun Palace, conceived of with the aid of Joan Littlewood and Cedric Price.
Sometime during this period, Pask met George Spencer-Brown who became a lodger at the Pask family's home while working at Stafford Beer and Roger Eddison's operational research consultancy SIGMA via strong recommendation from Bertrand Russell. It was here where Spencer-Brown is said to have written his Laws of Form for long hours whilst inebriated in the Pask family's bathtub. According to Vanilla Beer, Stafford's daughter, Pask is purported to have claimed while reminiscing about Spencer-Brown's time at his and his wife's household, that "When bathed, it wasn't often. He used my gin, to wash in". His wife Elizabeth is also purported to have said, in reference to Spencer-Brown having forgot her name after he ceased to be a lodger, "I wouldn't mind, but I cooked for him for six months".
Pask later earned a PhD in psychology from the University of London in 1964, and later joined Brunel University in 1968 as one of the founding Professors of the Cybernetics Department at Brunel. The department was originally intended to be a research institute that was originally spearheaded by the media proprietor Cecil Harmsworth King, who was influenced by Stafford Beer's work in management consulting. King died however shortly before its opening, meaning that the Brunel enterprise mostly became a post-graduate teaching department rather than a research institute. Since Pask could not find a viable solution for intersecting his work at System Research Ltd., with the department's permission decided to become a part-time Professor there while Frank George became full-time head of the Cybernetics Department. It was here he recruited Bernard Scott who he was introduced to by David Stuart, a newly appointed lecturer at Brunel in the Department of Psychology. Scott later went on a sixth-month internship as a research assistant at System Research Ltd., who himself would later be a major contributor to the development of conversation theory.
Pask later discontinued his work on chemical computers. This may have happened during the early 1960s, or during the mid-1960s. According to Peter Cariani, funding for alternative approaches to artificial intelligence had dried up. This turn in direction was triggered by a greater emphasis on research utilizing symbolic artificial intelligence. Previous approaches to artificial intelligence, which included the use of neural nets, evolutionary programming, cybernetics, bionics, and bio-inspired computing, were side-lined by various funding bodies and interest groups. This placed greater pressure on System Research Ltd., to use more orthodox digital computer approaches to technology-based issues. Peter Cariani has expressed the view, that if we were to build physical devices a la Pask, we would replicate a kind of electrochemical assemblages, which would "have properties radically different from contemporary neural networks".
Mallen documents that in 1968, Pask arrived to "create an exhibit for Jasia Reichardt's planned Cybernetic Serendipity project at the Institute of Contemporary Arts". It was here where Pask's Colloquy of Mobiles was first exhibited. The figures in the exhibit would dance and rotate when spectators entered their vicinity. The system was built by Mark Dowson and Tony Watts, based on Pask's initial conception and with Mallen helping to install it. According to Mallen, " It proved popular when it worked, but was a mite unreliable".
In 1970, Mallen and others designed Ecogame, a system dynamics model of a hypothetical national economy, which encouraged participants to reflect on their own behavior in the system. The pedagogical function was influenced by Pask's research and activity in cybernetics and media-art. According to Claudia Costa Pederson, Pask understood and put emphasis on the view that learning was a self-organized, mutual and participatory process. Ecogame was therefore a pedagogical simulation, that was supposed to engage the viewer with an intuitive interface. It was successfully demonstrated in September 1970 at the Computer '70 trade show at the Olympia conference centre in London. Ecogame was subsequently incorporated into the program of the First European Management Forum during February 1971, which later emerged as the forerunner to the World Economic Forum in Davos. A version of Ecogame was sold to IBM for management education in the Blaricum IBM center. The slide projection technology of Ecogame was incorporated by Stafford Beer into Project Cybersyn, implemented by Salvador Allende in Chile.
During the early 1970s, Pask became heavily involved in joint initiatives between his company and the Centre for the Study of Human Learning alongside Laurie Thomas and Shelia Harri-Augstein at Brunel on behalf of the Ministry of Defence to examine conversational approaches to anger, where he exhibited alongside his associates at his company his CASTE and BOSS technologies. By 1972, Pask began the process of compiling his work into the form of "a formal theory of conversational processes". Due to the academic environment, Pask was working in, he decided early on from 1972 to 1973 to report on the experimental contents of his research due to the emphasis on empirical studies and general distrust of grand theory. Whilst visiting professor of educational technology, he obtained a DSc in cybernetics from the Open University in 1974.
The collective work on Pask's interest in conversation at this time culminated in three major publications with the aid of Bernard Scott, Dionysius Kallikourdis, and others. At the same time Pask, with the assistance of the computer scientist Nick Green and others, had begun to work on military contracts on behalf of the United States Army and the United States Army Air Forces respectively. In 1975, Pask's team at System Research Ltd. had written and published The Cybernetics of Human Learning & Performance and Conversation, Cognition and Learning: A Cybernetic Theory and Methodology. In the subsequent year 1976, they published Conversation Theory: Applications in Education and Epistemology. It has been claimed that due to the prevailing orthodox attitudes of psychological research at the time, his work did not gain widespread acceptance in the area but found more success in educational research. Pask also sometime between 1975 and 1978, received funding from the Science and Engineering Research Council to develop the "Spy Ring" test in relation to his theory of learning styles.