1. Andrew Gordon Speedie Pask 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.
Gordon Pask 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.
Gordon Pask 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.
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.
Furtado Cardoso Lopes, school taught Gordon 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.
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.
Mallen suggests that during this year, Gordon Pask presented a lecture to Ealing College of Art on system theory and cybernetics.
Gordon Pask writes this influenced several students there, and represented a general ethos in the 1960s regarding the breaking of disciplinary boundaries for which Systems Research Ltd.
One notable project Gordon Pask became involved with involved the Fun Palace, conceived of with the aid of Joan Littlewood and Cedric Price.
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.
Mallen documents that in 1968, Gordon Pask arrived to "create an exhibit for Jasia Reichardt's planned Cybernetic Serendipity project at the Institute of Contemporary Arts".
Around 1978, Gordon Pask became more heavily involved in Ministry of Defence projects; yet he was struggling to keep 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 29 March 1996 at the London Clinic.
In later life, Gordon Pask benefited less often from the critical feedback of research peers, reviewers of proposals, or reports to government bodies in the US and UK.
Gordon Pask acted as a consultant to Nicholas Negroponte, whose earliest research efforts at the Architecture Machine Group on Idiosyncrasy and software-based partners for design have their roots in Gordon Pask's work.
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 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 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'.
SAKI was an adaptable keyboard machine created by Gordon Pask which fostered interactivity between user and machine.
Gordon Pask wrote extensively and contributed to a variety of institutions, journals, and publishing houses.