Paul Pangaro

Paul Pangaro is Director of the Laboratory for Cybernetics and Visiting Scholar at Carnegie Mellon Architecture, and President of the American Society for Cybernetics. His career spans startups, teaching, performance and consulting. He has been applying models of conversation to the design of interactions and organizations since his Ph.D. in Cybernetics (Brunel, UK) with Gordon Pask. His research and prototyping are grounded in the twin concepts of “design for conversation” and “design as conversation.” In the context of the American Society for Cybernetics, Pangaro is co-lead of the #NewMacy Initiative, where his personal focus is responding to the pandemic of today’s AI algorithms. In the context of education and addressing wicked challenges, Pangaro has brought in-world practitioners into collaborations that are grounded in the concerns and worldview of our newest generation of student-scholars. In the context of art and media, Pangaro collaborated with TJ McLeish, master fabricator of the COLLOQUY 2018 project, to reconstruct Gordon Pask’s seminal interactive art piece Colloquy of Mobiles, which appeared in the groundbreaking exhibition Cybernetic Serendipity in London in 1968. Their 2018 reconstruction was exhibited at Centre Pompidou in 2020 and is now part of the permanent collection at ZKM.