This paper presents semiotic engineering – a semiotic theory of HCI. The theory has the advantage to integrate back end and front end design and development perspectives into a single metacommunication process that affects the user’s experience and, ultimately, the success of any system. By means of illustrative examples, we show the kinds of effects that can be achieved with the theory, and di...

This document contains: 1° the complete translation of one paper by Pasteur (see for reference Conant’s Harvard case study on spontaneous generation) 2° the same text underlined and segmented by myself; 3° a rather complete semiotic inventory of the same text; 4° a tentative draft of a paper using this semiotic treatment to answer science studies question (partially published in (51) 1993: « Pa...

This paper presents some contributions of semiotic engineering to the identification of cultural issues involved in the design and evaluation of multicultural systems (i.e. systems designed for users from different cultures). We carried out a communicability evaluation of the International Children’s Digital Library. Participants of test sessions had different nationalities and spoke different ...

Our brains make up a series of signs and are engaged in making or manifesting or reacting to a series of signs: through this semiotic activity they are at the same time engaged in “being minds” and so in thinking intelligently. An important effect of this semiotic activity of brains is a continuous process of “externalization of the mind” that exhibits a new cognitive perspective on the mechani...

Background: Empathy in the context of patient care is defined as a predominantly cognitive attribute that involves an understanding of the patient's experiences, concerns, and perspectives, combined with a capacity to communicate this understanding and an intention to help. In medical education, it is recognized that empathy can be improved by interventional approaches. In this sense, a semioti...

Our brains make up a series of signs and are engaged in making or manifesting or reacting to a series of signs: through this semiotic activity they are at the same time engaged in “being minds” and so in thinking intelligently, in communicating and in extracting chances from the einvironment. An important effect of this semiotic activity of brains is a continuous process of “externalization of ...

To design interfaces, researchers in HCI have often set up ethnographic and ethnomethodological analysis of face-to-face situations that developers tried to emulate in on-line platform. Nonetheless, the observation of a group of designers producing an e-learning platform shows that this painting from nature/ after nature methodology is completed by a study of already mediated forms of interacti...

This paper presents the results of an in-depth qualitative study carried out to investigate the teaching and learning of Semiotic Engineering methods, namely the Semiotic Inspection and the Communicability Evaluation methods. We identified three kinds of abilities that are necessary for a better learning and application of these methods: systematic interpretation, abstraction and wide perspecti...

This paper argues that a semiotic-conceptual framework is suitable for knowledge representation because it combines conceptual structures with semiotic aspects. The advantages of such a framework are discussed and explained using an example from an ontology language.

General abstract: Here we introduce biosemiotics as a field of research that develops models of life processes focusing on their informational aspects. Peirce’s general concept of semiosis can be used to analyze such processes, and provide a powerful basis for understanding the emergence of meaning in living systems, by contributing to the construction of a theory of biological information. Pei...