Claudio Vandi — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 14:53:30 GMT

It seems to me that an important issue related to ambient signifiers would be: how to use perceptive cues to create a coherent ground?
I mean: what looks great to me when I use Mac OSX is that the window’s shadow and elements (keys, buttons and colours) are the same for a folder window, an application window and a browser window. On one side we have the nonsense of calling all these components with the same name (windows), which should (and does) confuse the user. On the other hand we have some “ambient signifiers” based on salient perceptual figures that create relations between different areas of the screen. That’s not just estethic, it’s pragmatic: figures are used to act in unknown contexts. To use your example, in a Tokyo train a user who have lost the cognition of which line he is using at the moment, can be helped by a sound at the next station. In the same way, the user who doesn’t understand how to delete a file from a new application he’s using will be helped by a “recycle bin like” icon or he’ll try to use a combination of keys he is used to. I developed these ideas in my thesis on the semiotic of GUI (if you want to know something more read my suggestion: 3722) and I’m glad to see a similar direction in what you wrote.

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