Andrew Gordon Speedie Pask (28 June 1928 – 29 March 1996) 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 (many of which can be found at the main Pask archive at the University of Vienna). 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.For Gordon Pask's main works of conversation theory, see , , and respectively.
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. notes that his brother Edgar was described by Pask as his hero and role model. Edgar was noted to have fought in World War II, and "carried out a series of life threatening experiments on himself aimed at increasing the survival rate of piolets" (p. 310). Edgar was thrown into pools unconscious to examine the properties of life jackets, thrown into the icy waters of Shetland, and so on. Pickering notes that this presented a hard act to follow for Pask, but "he did, in his own unusual way" (p. 311). 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, claims Pask to have been studying Psychology at the time; whereas claims Pask to have been studying Physiology. 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. notes that Pask's entrance into cybernetics dates to around this time. He had begun to accumulate early additions of the works of Wiener and Shannon.
He eventually obtained an MA in natural sciences from the university in 1952, 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, 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". notes that Pask had fallen in love with the world of the arts through a school friend who ran a traveling cinema company in Wales (p. 313). 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 (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), 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).
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, claims this would have been 40 years prior to the publication of his article, implying the date of their meeting would have been 1953 (p. 13). However, no exact confirmation of their first meeting is given to Beer. He also notes his "abysmal memory" (p. 14), such that the correctness of specific details in Beer's account cannot be confirmed. 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", 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 (e.g., ferrous sulfate) 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 (self-adaptive keyboard machine) 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, argues that the "Mechanization of Thought Processes" conference was likely the last large interdisciplinary meeting on general problems relating to artificial intelligence during the 20th century (p. 22). It contained people from direct programming (McCarthy, Minsky, Backus, Hopper, Bar-Hillel), neural nets (Selfridge, Uttley), cybernetics (Ashby, Pask), and neurophysiology (Barlow, McCulloch, Whitfield). London represented a critical point in the development of Pask's thinking: states the event occurred in 1959 (p. 33), while states the event took place in November 1958 (p. 22). 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. Warren McCulloch wrote in relation to the presentation that: "[Pask's] gadget does work; it does "take habits" by a mechanism that Charles Peirce proposed". expresses issue with the view that the organic evolution occurs through a brute force trial-and-error style process. He suggests other parameters must be at play which leads to the emergence of viable organisms: “I believe they are sought in the nature of her building blocks, [subatomic] particles, atoms, and molecules, proceeding discretely through well-regulated autocatalytic reactions to produce cells and cell aggregates, or, as in Pask's example, crystals" (p. 251). 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. is of the opinion that Pask's primary emphasis in his activity was not system building or inventing. Instead, he was a thinker or theoretician who wanted to embed his theory in tangible artefacts (p. 32).
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.Mallen later went on to help found the Computer Arts Society in 1968, alongside Alan Sutcliffe and John Lansdown. 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.