Don Norman talks about Semiotic Engineering
In his book The Design of Future Things (pp. 66-67) Don Norman tells the story of how he and Clarisse de Souza began discussing about the contrast between his Cognitive Engineering approach and SERG's Semiotic Engineering. At the center of this discussion was Norman's ideas about affordances and how the system image should express the logic of the design model.
He also wrote an essay, entitled Design as Communication, developing the ideas he discussed with Clarisse between 2000 and 2004. Read it online at: http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/design_as_communication.html.
More recently, after the publication of Clarisse and Carla's 2009 book entitled Semiotic Engineering Methods for Scientific Research in HCI, Don Norman referred to Semiotic Engineering in his column "The Way I see It" at ACM SIGCHI Interactions Magazine. In an article entitled Systems thinking: A product is more than the product he said:
In their recent book, de Souza and Leitão show how the communication approach of "semiotic engineering" can help ensure consistency and coherence. They critique the HCI community (and my past work) for optimizing the individual components at the expense of the whole. They are correct. A systems analysis goes beyond the design of individual screens or actions. It considers the entire experience from start to finish: thought through action through reflection. To make this a whole, seamless, coherent experience requires considering each action, each system response, each message—whether verbal or visual, silent or audible, visceral or behavioral, haptic or happenstance—all as part of the whole. Make sure that each message is consistent with the others in tone, voice, locus, and message. All steps must be readily accommodated, with the system always anticipating and ready for whichever choice the person makes. This is what it means to be a system: to think of everything.
