Biographical note

Klaus Krippendorff (PhD in Communication, University of Illinois, Urbana, 1967) is Professor of Communication and Gregory Bateson Term Professor for Cybernetics, Language, and Culture at the University of Pennsylvania′s Annenberg School for Communication. Besides numerous publications in journals of communication, sociological methodology, cybernetics, and system theory, he authored Information Theory, Structural Models for Qualitative Data, a Dictionary of Cybernetics, edited Communication and Control in Society, and coedited The Analysis of Communication Content and Developments and Scientific Theories and Computer Techniques. Besides supporting various initiatives to develop content analysis techniques and continuing work on reliability measurement, Klaus Krippendorff’s current interest is fourfold: With epistemology in mind, he inquires into how language brings forth reality. As a critical scholar, he explores the conditions of entrapment and liberation. As a second-order cybernetician, he plays with recursive constructions of self and others in conversations; and as designer, he attempts to move the meaning and human use of technological artifacts into the center of design considerations, causing a redesign of design – all of them exciting projects.