Exploring Richer Ecologies between Designers and Users

The fundamental contribution of Semiotic Engineering to human-computer interaction has been to propose and establish a discourse to conceptualize HCI not primarily about how users interact with computers but as computer-mediated communication between designers and users at interaction time. It represents an important contribution to explore the future of HCI beyond the focus of usability and interfaces. In our own research over the last few decades, we have also explored alternative approaches to create richer frameworks and ecologies how designers and users can interact in the design of computational artifacts. This contribution briefly describes some of these approaches by characterizing the problems that they addressed and the potential solutions that they explored.