Designing Meaningful Conversations

Back to conversations.  Can they be designed?  Goals are good.   Will our systems become intelligent only when they can carry on a meaningful conversation?

Designing meaningful interactions at work  from SlackHQ

Information designer Erika Hall on the relationship between collaboration and conversation
Erika Hall is the author of multiple books on interaction design, including Just Enough Research 

Conversation is the oldest interface, explains Erika Hall, co-founder of Mule Design. The purpose of conversation is essentially to cooperate and achieve a goal. The value of conversational tone is that it makes communication feel more personal, more palatable. And so interaction design must be about more than creating interfaces that talk and text. “Technology is valuable when it brings us more of what’s already meaningful,” she says.

In her new book, Conversational Design, Hall surveys the history of conversation and explores how people’s tone evolves as new mediums — like text messages — are introduced. She believes that this deeper understanding of the way people communicate can help designers and engineers develop systems that are more intuitive and simple to use. .... "