Related Reading
Other authors have written about Semiotics and HCI, or Semiotics and Computation, or Semiotics and Programming. Here are some references you may wish to look at.
- Peter Bögh Andersen's A Theory of Computer Semiotics is a must-read for all who are interested in semiotic approaches to HCI.Peter is a pioneer in this field, and has written extensively on this topic (see also The Computer as Medium, which he edited with Berit Holmqvist and Jens Jensen). Peter was a linguist by training, and was inspired by Helmslev's structural views on Semiotics. In January 2010 he died prematurely at the age of 64. "Together with Frieder Nake and Mihai Nadin, Andersen conducted one of the prestigious Dagstuhl Seminars, a one-week meeting of international scholars at Schloss Dagstuhl (Dagstuhl Castle) in Germany. Such seminars are dedicated to free and open discourse on an urgent issue of computing at top level. This meeting focused on Informatics and Semiotics, and was the first ever to seriously break ground in this highly interdisciplinary field of cultural-technological research. Based on this endeavor, he opened a discourse and started a book project with Frieder Nake on a rigorous semiotic foundation of computing. The book must now appear posthumously." (excertp from Frieder Nake's Memorial: Peter Bøgh Andersen (1945-2010))
- The Language-Action Perspective (LAP) is a precursor for many semiotic approaches to HCI, including Organizational Semiotics and Semiotic Engineering itself. Winograd and Flores's outstanding Understanding Computers and Cognition: New Foundations for Design is another must read for all interested in how people communicate with and through computers (and nor only those).
- For those who can read Portuguese, Lucia Santaella's O Método Anticartesiano de Peirce is a beautifully written scholarly piece on Peircean Semiotics. Although she does not discuss computers or HCI, she presents the foundations of much work that has been done in Semiotics and Computer Science or HCI.
- Mihai Nadin's Anticipation is a wonderfully thought-provoking book for those interested in how abducive processes can be explored in art, design, and indeed all spheres of human life. Check Mihai's view on Antecipation, Design and Interaction at Youtube.
- Kecheng Liu's Semiotics in Information Systems Engineering is a comprehensive account of the Organizational Semiotics approach based on Ron Stamper's work. In spite of name similarities with 'semiotic engineering', this approach is very different from SERG's, and focuses more on software and system's engineering aspects than on HCI. In Brazil, Cecilia Baranauskas at Unicamp has been applying Organizational Semiotics to investigate numerous aspects of HCI.
- Kevin Mullet and Darrell Sano's Designing Visual Interfaces is an excellent example of Applied Semiotics in the domain of HCI. Although it is not a new book (it was published in 1995), it is very much worth the reading.
- BJ Fogg's Persuasive Technologies is a great reading for those interested in computer-mediated human communication. The book does not make any reference to Semiotic Engineering (or Semiotics, except for footnotes), but it has numerous compelling examples of metacommunication (a key concept in Semiotic Engineering) and the impact of different computer-mediated human communication styles on those who receive it.
- Shaleph O'Neill's Interactive Media: The Semiotics of Embeded Interaction, "discusses the existing theoretical approaches of semiotically informed research in HCI, what is useful and the limitations. He proposes a radical rethink to this approach through a re-evaluation of important semiotic concepts and applied semiotic methods. Using a semiotic model of interaction he explores this concept through several studies that help to develop his argument.He concludes that this semiotics of interaction is more appropriate than other versions because it focuses on the characteristics of interactive media as they are experienced and the way in which users make sense of them rather than thinking about interface design or usability issues." (book description provided by AMAZON)
- Kevin Mullet and Darrell Sano's Designing Visual Interfaces is an excellent example of Applied Semiotics in the domain of HCI. Although it is not a new book (it was published in 1995), it is very much worth the reading.
- For those interested in how Semiotics can contribute to understand programming and computation (an a priori for HCI), we suggest the following readings.
- Donald MacKenzie's Mechanizing Proof, which discusses the social risks of (the meaning we socially assign to) computing. The book includes a historical account of passionate debate about program verification, in which James Fetzer participated invoking Semiotics in his argumentation (see Fetzer's paper Program Verification: The very idea). A sample chapter is available at The MIT Press website.
- Brian Cantwell-Smith's On the Origin of Objects, which also does not explicitly take a semiotic perspectice, but has a thought-provoking discussion of program meaning and intentionality.
- More recently, Kumiko Tanaka-Ishii's Semiotics of Programming has brought forth a well-founded discussion of reflexivity and self-reference as an evolutionary path in computer programming languages. showing that this path aims to approximate the very esence of signs in human experience.
