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 ...

This paper describes experiments with techniques for tracking hands and recognizing gestures. Complementary techniques are presented for detecting and tracking hands and tools. These techniques are integrated within a system which uses multiple image processing techniques to estimate the position and orientation of a hand. Images of the tracked hand are normalized in orientation and position an...

Object-oriented design patterns have been one of the most important and successful ideas in software design over the last ten years, and have been well adopted both in industry and academia. We provide a semiotic account of design patterns, treating a pattern as a sign comprised of the programmers’ intent and its realisation in the program. A number of open research problems remain regarding pa...

Departing from a Lockean illustration in the context of the history of the notion of Self, this article presents a discussion on dialogism as an effort to overcome ethnocentric views of human psychological phenomena. Dialogical approaches in psychology focus tensions between different viewpoints in face of an object of social representation (Marková, 2006). It is assumed that the socio-cultural...

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 arises as part of a discourse-focused commodity chain analysis elite foodways in the international airline industry. At center this critical intervention sits business class meal an epitomic manifestation contemporary privilege. As both fraught social hieroglyphic and complex semiotic assemblage, “premium” dining is articulated across different sites through range communicative pract...

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.