This paper presents Manas, a Semiotic Engineering epistemic tool for the design of collaborative systems (CoSys) whose aim is to expand the designers’ knowledge and awareness of their influence on groups and group dynamics. Manas has been developed to help designers represent their conception of computer-mediated communication and reflect upon some of its potential social effects, springing fro...

This paper discusses how semiotic engineering can support the formulation of problems and solutions involved in handling face-to-face (F2F) sociability models in computer-mediated communication (CMC). Based on a case study where a group of users migrated through different types of CMC systems, we show that the designer’s model of F2F sociability is extensively signified and encoded into technol...

Computer vision offers many new possibilities for making machines aware and responsive to man. Manipulating objects is a natural means by which man operates on and shapes his environment. By tracking the hands of a person manipulating objects, computer vision allows any convenient object, including fingers, to be used as a computer input devices. In the first part of this paper we describe expe...

What is a semiotic machine? A robot, a computer running programs endowed with artificial intelligence, any computer, a simple calculating machine, or even an ordinary mechanical typewriter? The question will be examined in the light of Charles Sanders Peirce’s concept of semiosis, which requires reference to processes such as reasoning, translation, interpretation, control, self-control, autopo...

Computer engineering proposes the construction of complex systems by dynamic prototyping (Buddle and Bacon, 1992). But this prototyping cannot be inductive and purely considered as a trial an error process. To be successful, one must possess an underlying hypothetical model (Marr, 1982) of what are the functions of the system. If these functions relates to physical tasks, such as sensing temper...

Abstract This article seeks to investigate the role that a symbol—connected legal event and collective trauma—has in construction of past imaginary. It begins with theoretical reflection on symbol as proposed by Juri Lotman function repetition consolidation memory. subsequently focuses semiotic resonance one specific object: bulletproof cabin Nazi criminal Adolf Eichmann, used during his trial ...

This paper describes the use of Semiotic Engineering methods in the context of multi-touch interaction. Focusing on the analysis of user testing data, we describe the transferability of Semiotic Engineering methods (specifically the Communicability Evaluation Method) across two interaction paradigms. While Communicability Evaluation is traditionally used for the analysis of graphical user inter...

In this reply to James H. Fetzer’s “Minds and Machines: Limits to Simulations of Thought and Action”, I argue that computationalism should not be the view that (human) cognition is computation, but that it should be the view that cognition (simpliciter) is computable. It follows that computationalism can be true even if (human) cognition is not the result of computations in the brain. I also ar...

This paper presents an approach to object oriented requirements engineering and business process re-engineering with a number of advantages over the widely used use case technique. It points out some problems with the use case approach and explains the origins of the idea of task scripts. It compares the two approaches and defines their interrelatedness. The paper sets out to improve and clarif...