Paul Pangaro
Visiting Scholar in Computational Design
Paul Pangaro is a Visiting Scholar in Computational Design in the Carnegie Mellon University School of Architecture. Previously, he was Professor of Practice in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon. He also holds a courtesy appointment in the School of Design in the College of Fine Arts. Paul is the President of the American Society for Cybernetics.
Paul's career spans startups, consulting, research, and education. His work explores the role of conversation in expanding human agency in human-human as well as human-machine interactions. His knowledge and practice of cybernetics, systems, conversation theory, design, and artificial intelligence are the basis of his approach.
Paul and Hugh Dubberly co-chair the Systems Working Group in the Future of Design Education Initiative. As an educator, Paul begins with the conviction that 21st-century designers, architects, and technologists must wholly engage with the complex systems that comprise the entangled domains of technology and human nature, society and justice, climate change and planet health.
With the American Society for Cybernetics, Paul is leading an initiative to revive and revise the renowned Macy Meetings from the birth of cybernetics. Now dubbed #NewMacy, the initiative has attracted an international community of transdisciplinary and transgenerational participants committed to addressing the complex systems-level challenges mentioned above.
Paul is deeply committed to bringing the field of cybernetics to light across multiple disciplines and domains. For example, Paul and TJ McLeish have created a full-scale, faithful replica of Gordon Pask’s seminal interactive work, Colloquy of Mobiles. In 2019 Colloquy was exhibited at Centre Pompidou in Paris and is now part of the permanent collection of the ZKM Museum in Karlsruhe, Germany.