Interaction14

5-8 February 2014, Amsterdam

Thursday, February 6

Languaging reality, dialogue and interaction

Thursday 09:45 Gashouder #GH

In his keynote, Klaus will distinguish four theories from the philosophy of language and elaborate on dialogical conceptions of how reality comes to be constructed. To him, languaging – the process of conversing in language – is a creative and fundamentally socio-cultural practice. Language does not merely describe, it creates realities in conversations and actions. Dialogical conceptions raise doubts in several common epistemological assumptions. Questioning them could open possibilities of seeing interaction design in a new way.

Three questions arise from these elaborations:

  1. What of everyday languaging can (or already does) inform human computer interactions (HCI) within its algorithmic affordances. Are there limitations or unrecognized possibilities?
  2. Beyond the individualist conceptions of professional HCI discourse, what might it take to enable interactions that facilitate the larger socio-cultural conversations, fundamentally altered by digital technology?
  3. What does it take for the professional discourse of HCI to embrace everyday languaging.

There are no simple answers.

Klaus' only hope is to encourage conversations on what the discourse within the interaction design community does beyond its boundary.

Klaus Krippendorff

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Klaus Krippendorff

About Klaus: Klaus Krippendorff (PhD in Communication, University of Illinois, Urbana, 1967) is Professor of Communication and Gregory Bateson Term Professor for Cybernetics, Language, and Culture at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication.

Besides supporting various initiatives to develop content analysis techniques and continuing work on reliability measurement, Klaus Krippendorff’s current interest is fourfold:

  • With epistemology in mind, he inquires into how language brings forth reality.
  • As a critical scholar, he explores the conditions of entrapment and liberation.
  • As a second-order cybernetician, he plays with recursive constructions of self and others in conversations;
  • and as designer, he attempts to move the meaning and human use of technological artifacts into the center of design considerations, causing a redesign of design – all of them exciting projects.

Approaches like Human Centered Design and Product Semantics are presented in his book "The Semantic Turn - a new foundation for design" (2005), which is considered the best contemporary book on design theory. His most recent book is "Content Analysis: An Introduction to Its Methodology" (2012).