Claudio Vandi — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 09:02:17 GMT

Hi, thank you for the interesting article which i could spot only today (while it’s on the website since 2003) I agree with you that Semiotics can be of some use for designers, not only as a mysterious language to describe simple things, but as a theory to understand how people interpret the world in order to act on it. For this reason I agree with Rob that Peirce is a key reference for semiotics. I would like to hear your opinion on what i think could be the role for semiotics in GUI design. According to my idea (resumed in an idea about metaphors http://www.boxesandarrows.com/idea/view/3722) semiotics can go beyond the “look and feel” to analyze the user’s action in its practical unfolding.
If we choose our categories wisely (that for me means mostly Peirce categories), then semiotics can say something on how design matters in the continuous action of a user carrying out some task. I can assure you that “practical application of semiotic theory” are far from being absent.
For example semiotics can help us to sketch a theory of how the user learns the interface while using it, and not only by recognizing the referent of a single sign. This is the difference between a semiotics of signs as taxonomy and a semiotic of signs as action oriented elements. To be used, to be “acted”, is the key role of interfaces. Pragmatics teaches us that there is no meaning out of a pragmatic horizon, out of an actual practice. This leads to a semiotic theory that can say more than what is needed to recognize a sign as a sign of something.

Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Claudio Vandi