Gordon Pask

Pask was born in Derby, England, on June 28, 1928, to his parents Percy and Mary Pask.[3] His father, being "a partner in Pask, Cornish and Smart, a wholesale fruit business in Covent Garden".[4] He had two older siblings, Alfred who trained as an engineer before coming a Methodist minister and Edgar who was a professor of Anesthetics.[5][Footnote 1]Shortly after his birth, his family moved to the Isle of Wight.[3] He was educated at Rydal Penrhos, and later went on to complete two diplomas in Geology and Mining Engineering from Liverpool Polytechnic and Bangor University respectively.[3]

Pask later attended Cambridge University around 1949 to study for a bachelor's degree,[Footnote 2] where he met his future associate and business partner Robin McKinnon-Wood who was studying his undergraduate in Maths and Physics at the time.[6][7] 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.[6] 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.[8][7]

He eventually obtained an MA in natural sciences from the university in 1952,[3] and met his future wife Elizabeth Pask (née Poole) 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, Mersey.[9] They married in 1956 and later had two daughters together.[3]

In 1953, Pask formally founded alongside his wife Elizabeth and Robin McKinnon-Wood the research organization System Research Ltd., in Richmond, Surrey.[3] According to McKinnon-Wood, his and Pask's early forays in musical comedy production at Cambridge through their earlier company Sirelelle lay 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".[6] After rebranding the company to System Research Ltd., the company became non-profit in 1961 with significant funding being derived from the United States Army and Airforce.[3][10]

Throughout its existence, the company 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.[3][11] During the active period of System Research Ltd., he and his associates worked on a number of projects including SAKI (self-adaptive keyboard machine), MusiColour (a light show where the colored lights would reduce their responsiveness to a given keyboard input over time so as to induce the keyboard player to play a different range of notes,[12] and finally educational technologies such as CASTE (Couse Assembly System Tutorial Environment) and Thoughtsticker (both of which were developed in the context of what became conversation theory).[3][13]

During this period, Pask and McKinnon-Wood were asked to demonstrate their proof of concept for MusiColour on behalf of Billy Butlin.[14] 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",[14] due to McKinnon-Wood "buying junk electronic capacitors".[14] 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.[14]

Stafford Beer also claims to have met Pask sometime during this period at a dinner party in Sheffield,[15][Footnote 3] and notes of both his genius, the difficulty in following his thought, and getting hold of; remarking both that "[Pask's] conception of things is not anyone else's perception of things",[16] and that "The man can be quite infuriating".[17] Between the early to mid-1950s, Pask began to develop electrochemical devices designed to find their own "relevance criteria",[18] whereby Pask performed experiments utilizing "electrochemical assemblages, passing current through various aqueous solutions of metallic salts (e.g. ferrous sulfate) in order to construct an analog control system".[19] During the late 1950s, Pask managed to get a prototype device working.[20] Oliver Selfridge noted that it was the second such mechanism, whereby "a machine build a machine electronically without any physical motion", actually worked.[21]

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.[22][23] 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".[24] von Foerster later asked Pask to join him at the Biological Computer Laboratory at the University of Illinois;[25][23] subsequently describing him after his death as both being difficult yet a genius.[26] He also this year produced SAKI (self-adaptive keyboard machine) for the instruction and development of keyboard skills aimed at the commercial marketplace.[1]

His former research assistant Bernard Scott argues that the "The Mechanisation of Thought Processes" conference at the National Physics Laboratory in Teddington,[Footnote 4] London represented a critical point in the development of Pask's thinking:[Footnote 5] It was here Pask first published his paper "Physical Analogues to the Growth of a Concept" (1959) which contained a theoretical discussion on how the "growth of crystals [through the use of] electrodes suspended in an electronic solution", could be used to represent in purely physical phenomenon the growth of a concept.[23] 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.[1][Footnote 6]

During the 1960s, Pask worked significantly with psychologist B. N. Lewis and computer scientist G. L. Mallen.[10] In 1961, Pask published An Approach to Cybernetics.[27] According to Ranulph Glanville, the work argued in favor 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.[28]

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 (Science in General Management) via strong recommendation from Bertrand Russell.[29] 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.[12][29] 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 [Spencer-Brown] bathed, it wasn't often. He used my gin, to wash in".[29] 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".[29]

Pask later earned a PhD in psychology from the University of London in 1964,[3] and later joined Brunel University in 1968 as one of the founding Professors of the Cybernetics Department at Brunel.[30] 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.[30] 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.[30] 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.[31] 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.[32][33]

According to Peter Cariani, by the mid-1960s, funding for alternative approaches to artificial intelligence had dried up. This turn came as greater emphasis was placed on programs symbolic artificial intelligence. Previous approaches to artificial intelligence (which included the use of neural nets, evolutionary programming, cybernetics, bionics, and biological computing) were side-lined by funding bodies and interest groups. This placed greater pressure on System Research Ltd., to use more orthodox digital approaches to technology-based issues.[34][Footnote 7]

During the early 1970s, Pask became heavily involved in joint initiatives between his company and the Centre for the Study of Human Learning (CSHL) 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.[35] By 1972, Pask began the process of compiling his work into the form of "a formal theory of conversational processes".[36] Due to the academic environment, Pask was working in, he decided early on in the period of 1972–1973 to report on the experimental contents of his research due to the emphasis on empirical studies and general distrust of grand theory.[37] Whilst visiting professor of educational technology, he obtained a DSc in cybernetics from the Open University in 1974.[3]

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.[Footnote 8] At the same time Pask, with the assistance of the computer scientist Nick Green and others, had begun to work of military contracts for on behalf on the United States Army and the United States Army Air Forces respectively.[38] 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.[39][40] In the subsequent year 1976, they published Conversation Theory: Applications in Education and Epistemology.[41] 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.[42] Pask also sometime during the period of 1975-1978, received funding from the Science and Engineering Research Council to develop the "Spy Ring" test in relation to his theory of learning styles.[38]

Around 1978, Pask became more heavily involved in Ministry of Defence projects; yet was struggling to keep alive his own company viable.[43] The company later disbanded in the early 1980s, whereby he moved on to teach for a time at Concordica University and then the University of Amsterdam (in the Centre for Innovation and Co-operative Technology), and the Architectural Association in London,[44][45] where he acted as a doctoral supervisor for Ranulph Glanville.[46] During the early 1980s, Pask co-authored Calculator Saturnalia (1980) with the help of Ranulph Glanville and Mike Robinson, which consisted of a collection of games to play on a calculator; he also co-authored Microman Living and growing with computers (1982) with Susan Curran Macmillan.[45]

According to Glanville, Pask semi-retired on June 28, 1993.[46] During the last few years of his life Pask set up the company Pask Associates, a managment consultancy firm, whose clients included the Club of Rome, Hydro Aluminium and the Architecture Association.[38] He also provided some preliminary work for a project on behalf on the London Underground, and received initial support from Greenpeace International at the Imperial College London's Department of Electronics for a project in quantitative chemical analysis.[38] He obtained a ScD from his college, Downing Cambridge in 1995,[3] and later died on March the 29th 1996 at the London Clinic.[47]

Pask's primary contributions to cybernetics, educational psychology, learning theory, and systems theory, as well as to numerous other fields, was his emphasis on the personal nature of reality, and on the process of learning as stemming from the consensual agreement of interacting actors in a given environment ("conversation").

His work was complex, extensive, and deeply thought out, at least until late in his life, when he benefited less often from critical feedback from research peers, reviewers of proposals and reports to government bodies in the US and UK, and, perhaps most especially, the tension between experimentation and theoretical stands. His publications, however, represent a storehouse of ideas that are not fully mined.[48]

According to Paul Pangaro, a former student of his, Pask was critical of certain interpretations of artificial intelligence which were common during the eras he was active in.[4] Pangaro claims that Pask had managed to simulate intelligence-like behaviors with electro-mechanical machines in the 1950s, with Pangaro further arguing "By realising that intelligence resides in interaction, not inside a head or box, his path was clear. To those who didn't understand his philosophical stance, the value of his work was invisible [to them]".[4] The emphasis for Pask, according to Pangaro, was that human intellectual activity existed as part of a kind of resonance that looped from a human individual through an environment or apparatus, back through to the individual.[4][12][Footnote 9]

Musicolour was an interactive light installation developed by Pask during the 1950s. It responded to musicians' variations and, if they did not vary their playing, it would become 'bored' and stop responding, prompting the musicians to respond.

Musicolour was influential on Cedric Price's Generator project, via the work of consultants Julia and John Frazer.[53][54]

Pask collaborated with architect Cedric Price and theatre director Joan Littlewood on the radical Fun Palace project during the 1960s, setting up the project's 'Cybernetics Subcommittee'.

Pask participated in the seminal exhibition "Cybernetic Serendipity" (ICA London, 1968) with the interactive installation "Colloquy of Mobiles", continuing his ongoing dialogue with the visual and performing arts. (cf Rosen 2008, and Dreher's History of Computer Art)

• 1961, An Approach to Cybernetics. Hutchinson.
• 1975, Conversation, cognition and learning. New York: Elsevier.
• 1975, The Cybernetics of Human Learning and Performance. Hutchinson.
• 1976, Conversation Theory, Applications in Education and Epistemology. Elsevier.
• 1981, Calculator Saturnalia, Or, Travels with a Calculator : A Compendium of Diversions & Improving Exercises for Ladies and Gentlemen with Ranulph Glanville and Mike Robinson. Wildwood.
• 1982, Microman Living and growing with computers. with Susan Curran Macmillan.

• 1993, Interactions of Actors, Theory and Some Applications, Download incomplete 90-page manuscript of 1993.
• 1996, Heinz von Foerster's Self-Organisation, the Progenitor of Conversation and Interaction Theories, Systems Research (1996) 13, 3, pp. 349–362

• U.S. Patent 2,984,017 – Apparatus for assisting an operator in performing a skill (1961)

• Cybernetic Serendipity, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London (1968)