The contribution of the language-action perspective to a new foundation for design

After more than 20 years, we are in the condition of better understanding the contribution of “Understanding Computers and Cognition” by Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores to the development of HCI, CSCW and related areas and the debate accompanying its publication. The language-action perspective, underlining the deep interconnections of human action with the conversations among its actors, once liberated by its schematic reduction to univocal speech acts, appears always more as a natural companion of the situated action paradigm; the assumption of conversations, instead of messages, as basic units of interpersonal communication is of paramount importance for supporting situatedness; the attention to the philosophical discourse, and in particular to phenomenology and hermeneutics, has generated a thread of contributions grounding the development of ICT applications on a deep understanding of human condition.