A Cognitive Semiotic Approach to the Aesthetic Interplay between Form and Meaning in Responsive Environments

The aim of this paper is to introduce a cognitive semiotic approach, which offers a clearer understanding of how interactive design products communicate their meaning to users. The ongoing shift in contemporary design towards making user interfaces aesthetically more engaging (tangible, intuitive, etc.) challenges traditional design semiotics on a number of its basic assumptions about meaning construction. One major problem being that design semiotics often restricts its idea of semiosis to object oriented recognition where ‘cognitive models’ are unambiguously matched against a visual form. As has been pointed out on several occasions this does not capture the cross modal interaction between body movement and vision, emotion and vision that plays such a crucial role when we make sense of interaction design. In order to achieve this I will argue that design semiotics can benefit largely from picking up models from morphodynamics and neurocognitive research into how our brain, body and mind mutually shape one another. By applying these models in an analysis of a case example, the paper intends to demonstrate that these models provide an explanation of how conceptual meaning in responsive environments is anchored in morphologies and structures in perception. What I call the aesthetic interplay between form and meaning.