The Coordinator
The Coordinator was a system designed by Terry Winograd to “provide facilities for generating, transmitting, storing, retrieving, and displaying messages that are records of moves in conversations.” (Winograd, 1987) Unlike Musicolor, which interprets the data input into its system, The Coordinator allows “people [to] do the interpretation of natural language, and let[s] the program deal with explicit declarations of structure” (Winograd, 1987). Wheraes a typical conversational interface provides “a uniform command to initiate a new message [(texting, email)], The Coordinator system provides options for opening conversations that have different implicit structures of action.” (Winograd, 1987) For example, “when Request is selected, templates appear prompting the user to specify an addressee, others who will receive copies, a domain, which groups or categorizes related conversations, and an action description, corresponding to the subject header in traditional mail systems.” (Winograd, 1987) If a user were to select a different option, they would be provided with a different template designed for that specific request.
By confirming “shared mental models” (Dubberly & Pangaro, 2009) especially during the convergence on agreement, conversational interfaces afford the successful exchange of “thoughts and words.” (OED Online, 2017) The Coordinator provides a successful example in “confirm[ing] … shared mental models” (Dubberly & Pangaro, 2009). Coordinator users were explicitly aware of what type of statement others were delivering, allowing for a better understanding.
Connection
The Coordinator demonstrates how by making a user’s line of thought more visible to the other systems interacting with them, a conversation can be advanced in a more beneficial direction. Similar mechanisms to make thoughts more visible could be particularly helpful in artifacts I create for more productive conversations between partners.
