29 Facts About Gordon Pask

Andrew Gordon Speedie Pask was a British cybernetician, educational psychologist, inventor, and educational technologist who made multiple contributions to cybernetics, educational psychology, educational technology, and epistemology.

Gordon Pask is known for the development of conversation theory.

Gordon Pask's father was "a partner in Pask, Cornish and Smart, a wholesale fruit business in Covent Garden".

Gordon Pask had two older siblings: Alfred, who trained as an engineer before becoming a Methodist minister, and Edgar, a professor of Anesthetics.

Gordon Pask's family moved to the Isle of Wight shortly after his birth.

Gordon Pask later went on to complete two diplomas in Geology and Mining Engineering from Liverpool Polytechnic and Bangor University respectively.

Gordon 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, Gordon Pask was living in Jordan's Yard, Cambridge under the supervision of the scientist and engineer John Brickell.

Gordon Pask 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.

Gordon Pask 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, Mersey.

In 1953, Gordon Pask formally founded alongside his wife Elizabeth and Robin McKinnon-Wood the research organization System Research Ltd.

Between the early to mid-1950s, Gordon Pask began to develop electrochemical devices designed to find their own "relevance criteria".

Gordon 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.

Sometime during this period, Gordon Pask met George Spencer-Brown who became a lodger at the Gordon Pask family's home while working at Stafford Beer and Roger Eddison's operational research consultancy SIGMA via strong recommendation from Bertrand Russell.

Gordon 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.

Around 1978, Gordon Pask became more heavily involved in Ministry of Defence projects; yet was struggling to keep alive his own company viable.

Gordon Pask later disbanded in the early 1980s, whereby he moved on to teach for a time at Concordia University and then the University of Amsterdam, and the Architectural Association in London, where he acted as a doctoral supervisor for Ranulph Glanville.

Gordon Pask provided some preliminary work for a project on behalf of 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.

Gordon Pask obtained a ScD from his college, Downing Cambridge in 1995, and later died on March the 29th 1996 at the London Clinic.

Gordon Pask's 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.

Gordon Pask's publications represent a storehouse of ideas that are not fully mined.

Andrew Pickering argues that Gordon Pask was a "character" in the traditional British sense of the term, as he likens both Stafford Beer and Grey Walter.

Gordon Pask was noted by his former colleagues as being capable of great kindness and generosity, yet sometimes the utter disregard for the individuals he associated himself with.

Gordon Pask mellowed in later years and, inspired by his wife Elizabeth, converted to Roman Catholicism, which according to Scott, "deeply satisfied his need for understandings that address the great mysteries of life".

The emphasis for Gordon 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.

Gordon 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'.

Gordon Pask participated in the seminal exhibition "Cybernetic Serendipity" with the interactive installation "Colloquy of Mobiles", continuing his ongoing dialogue with the visual and performing arts.

Gordon Pask wrote several books and more than two hundred journal articles.

Gordon Pask influenced Nicholas Negroponte, whose earliest research efforts at the Architecture Machine Group on "idiosyncratic systems" and software-based partners for design have their roots in Gordon Pask's work as a consultant to Negroponte's efforts.