Autonomy is a crucial property of an artificial agent. The type of representational structures and the role they play in the preservation of an agent’s autonomy are pointed out. A framework of self-organised Peircean semiotic processes is introduced and it is then used to demonstrate the emergence of grounded representational structures in agents interacting with their environment. 1 Autonomy a...

Empirical studies have revealed that most users are dissatisfied with current help systems. One of the causes for many of the problems found in help systems is a lack of coupling between the process for creating online help and the human-computer interaction design of the application. In this paper, we present a method for building online help based on design models according to a Semiotic Engi...

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...

Animation has always had its champions. Animators and fans have often proved eager to sing the praises of animation and especially to laud it over and above cinema. To give examples: French animation director René Laloux (2006) famously declared animation to be the true cinema, and in a humourous yet profound essay exploring the ‘evolution’ of Mickey Mouse from adult to juvenile, renowned biolo...

Using performance and theatricality as metaphors to describe MUD adventure games this paper starts out by defining a difference between ’performative’ and ’theatrical’ acts within MUDs. Performative acts differ from theatrical acts in that they are effecting ’real’ changes to the MUD environment, thus directly influencing the game in one way or another. It is argued that to understand the perfo...

Abstract. We report on a case study in the emergence of a lexicon in a group of autonomous distributed agents situated and grounded in an open environment. Because the agents are autonomous, grounded, and situated, the possible words and possible meanings are not fixed but continuously change as the agents autonomously evolve their communication system and adapt it to novel situations. The case...