Klaus Krippendorff

Klaus Krippendorff (1932 Frankfurt am Main, Germany) is a German cyberneticist and professor of Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, USA.

Overview

Krippendorff was born in 1932 in Frankfurt am Main in Germany. He graduated as Ingenieur in 1954 at the State Engineering School Hanover, and in 1961 he received a diploma in Design from the Ulm School of Design, Ulm, Germany. In 1967 he received a Ph.D. in communications at the University of Illinois, Urbana.

Krippendorff started working as Research Assistant at the Institute for Visual Perception at the Ulm School of Design in 1961. For two years he was became a Ford International Fellow and went to the States working at the University of Illinois for two years to end up at the University of Pennsylvania, were he would keep working at the Annenberg School for Communication since 1980 as a Professor of Communication. [http://www.asc.upenn.edu/usr/krippendorff/page2vita.htm CV Klaus Krippendorff] , retrieved sept 2007.]

He is member of the editorial boards of 18 journals as "Communication and Information Science", "Communication Research", "Cybernetics & Human Knowing", "International Journal of Cultural Studies" and the "Journal of Communication". And he has been reviewer for a dozen instutitutes and journals from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to "The Sociological Quarterly", the "Journal of the American Statistical Association", "Journal for Peace Research", the "Management Communication Quarterly" and the "Journalism: Theory, Practice & Criticism".

He was award 1971 an MA (Honorary) from the University of Pennsylvania, the 1971 Award for "On Generating Data in Communication Research" as the most outstanding contribution to The Journal of Communication in 1970. He further received the Norbert Wiener Medal in Cybernetics in gold by the American Society for Cybernetics in 2001, the ICA Fellows Book Award for Content Analysis, An Introduction to Its Methodology in 2004 and the Norbert Wiener/Hermann Schmidt Prize by the German Society for Cybernetics, German Society for Pedagogy and Information, at the University of Vienna.

Work

Klaus Krippendorff research interests reach from epistemology to design:
* Constructivist epistemology and second-order cybernetics;
* Mathematical foundations of cybernetics, general systems, communication and information theories.
* Content analysis
* Disagreement and reliability analysis
* Critical scholarship;
* Design principles for the information age.

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. [ [http://www.sagepub.com/authorDetails.nav?contribId=502518 Klaus Krippendorff] , Sage publications, 2006.]

See also

* Concordance correlation coefficient
* Content analysis
* Social entropy
* Satisficing
* The Semantic Turn

Publications

Klaus Krippendorff has published widely on cybernetics and systems theory, on methodology in the social sciences, and on human communication: [ [http://www.asc.upenn.edu/usr/krippendorff/page3pub.htm Klaus Krippendorff's Publications] ]
* 1967, "An Examination of Content Analysis: A Proposal for a Framework and an Information Calculus for Message Analytic Situations", Ph.D. Dissertation, Urbana: University of Illinois, 400 pp.
* 1980, "Content Analysis; An Introduction to its Methodology", Beverly Hills CA: Sage, 188 pp.
* 1986, " [http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/ASC/INDEXASC.html A Dictionary of Cybernetics] ", Norfolk VA: The American Society for Cybernetics.
* 1986, "Information Theory: Structural Models for Qualitative Data", Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 96 pp.
* 1989, with Reihhart Butter (Eds.) (1989). Product Semantics. "Design issues",
* 1994, "Design: A Discourse on Meaning; A Work Book", Philadelphia PA: University of the Arts.
* 2006, "The Semantic Turn; A New Foundation for Design", New York: Taylor & Francis CRC, 349 pp.

Articles, a selection:
* 1970, "Bivariate agreement coefficients for reliability of data", in E. F. Borgatta: "Sociological Methodology". San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 139–150.

References

External links

* [http://www.asc.upenn.edu/usr/krippendorff/ Klaus Krippendorff's] Homepage at asc.upenn.edu
* [http://spmc.open.ac.uk/2003july15-17-spmc-ukss-ouss-21cen-visions.htm Systems practice for managing complexity] , International conference 15-17th July 2003, St Anne's College, Oxford.