Using examples from his client projects, software and teaching, Paul Pangaro will discuss cybernetics, conversation, design and their synergistic roles. The core models of cybernetics—feedback systems, requisite variety, conversation, and bio-cost—create a foundational, shared and explanatory language across disciplines and domains of applications. Conversation theory, developed from cybernetic observations of human interaction, creates a single framework for encompassing deterministic relationships with systems of objects, as well as those of subjectivity, values, re-framing, and argumentation, in systems of participants. As such, conversation can be applied to the processes of design, comprising as they do all these aspects, even as they start from basic feedback models of goal-directed systems. Therefore, cybernetics, encompassing conversation, proffers a model for design as a pragmatic language for understanding, augmenting and co-evolving our collaborations as actors in a world for which we hope for better outcomes.