As they taught me at La Sapienza one of the billions of model of communication is based on sharing values, cultures, point of views. I like this idea of it because it implies that both of the interlocutors put part of their background in the middle, on the stage of a critical and hopefully constructive comparison of things.
Business is global and the comparison between different cultures it’s not just a matter of passionate anthropologists anymore. On the other side, it is not possible to have a personal expert that gives advices on the go when different parts are communicating to find an agreement.
A while ago I had an interesting idea with some of my former university colleagues (namely Adam Bognar, Andrew Simpson and Layda Gongora): a table designed to making the closure of an agreement evident to the talking parts. Let’s suppose that the table is able to analyse what it is being said and compare different talkings in order to calculate a degree of agreement between them. Let’s also imagine that the table would lengthen if the parts do not agree on the topic and that it would shorten and draw up them as they become closer to an end.
The corrispondence between situation, interaction and the very physical modification of the interface has something spectacular. Especially because of the little effort the table asks when the situation is channging (moving your own position back and forth).
