Interface design: A semiotic paradigm*

Design principles are semiotic by nature. To design means to structure systems of signs in such a way as to make possible the achievement of human goals: communication (as a form of social interaction), engineering (as a form of applied technical rationality), business (as a form of shared efficiency), architecture, art, education, etcetera. Design comes about in an environment traditionally called culture, currently identified as artificial (through a rather romantic distinction between natural and artificial), and acts as a bridge between scientific and humanistic praxes. A long this line of thinking, Simon (1982) stated, ‘Engineering, medicine, business, architecture, and painting are concerned not with the necessary but with the contingent not with how things are but how things might be in short, with design’. The object of semiotics is sign systems and their functioning within culture. For a long time (and for reasons whose presentation is beyond the scope of this article), one type of sign the symbol has been considered representative of all signs in human culture: ‘for most of us . . . the significant part of the environment consists mostly of strings of artifacts called “symbols” that we receive through eyes and ears in the form of written and spoken language and that we pour out into the environment as I am now doing by mouth or hand’ (Simon 1982). Actually, we perceive signs through all our senses, and we generate signs that address the same. The fact that some of these signs (visual, auditory) are more important should not prevent us from considering any other sign that can be used for representation, communication, and communication functions. But before dealing with these basic functions, we have to settle upon one of the many definitions of sign that have been advanced in the field of semiotics, and then apply it as consistently as possible. The definitions fall into two basic categories: 1. Adoption of one kind of sign usually pertaining to verbal language as a paradigm, with the understanding that every other sign is structurally equivalent. Artificial intelligence researchers are quite comfortable with this model. The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure advanced