Dear Jeffrey,
Thanks for your post. I really agree with you, and by saying this, I hope to clarify my position in my previous post.
Even if we are interested in the mechanics of understanding design in a semantic way, we cannot forget the contributions of those who were interested really in exploring what might be the structures of meaning in any artificial productive activity (in a broader sense than design).  Even if we can easily disproof the instrumental utility of a theory that never wanted to be instrumental, this doesn’t mean that such theory is not full of interesting ideas, indisputable historical facts and, most of all, intellectually inspiring discourse.
Eco’s semiotics contribution to contemporary design is not measurable in direct contributions to mechanical methodologies, but yet, to an intellectual insatiable curiosity that any designer (in the tradition of the intellectual professionals) should  develop.
Thanks,
Eduardo


No dia 23/02/2016, às 15:47, Bardzell, Jeffrey S <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> escreveu:



All,

Thank you for this interesting thread.

I understand the difference between semantics and semiotics above all as genealogical. Semantics (in Klaus' use) is derived from late Wittgenstein and the tradition it initiated, including ordinary language philosophy, speech act theory, and a variety of useful concepts such as "language games," "family resemblances," "private languages" (the impossibility of), deflationary/therapeutic philosophy, and so forth. I myself am very interested in and sympathetic to this tradition and the ways it has informed philosophical aesthetics.

But I am less happy to see the dismissive accounts of semiotics that have been posted in this thread. In the spirit of inviting scholarly engagement and letting people find their own value/use of semiotics (or to reject it in an informed way), I want to share some thoughts and leads.

Semiotics has two primary sources: in the pragmatist philosophy of C.S. Peirce and in the work of Ferdinand de Saussure. It has advocated for several useful concepts, including signifier, signified, and referent; difference (which was the driving concept of poststructuralism), paradigm and syntagm, denotation and connotation, langue and parole, actual vs. implied speaker and actual vs. implied reader. (And I would also add that reducing signifiers to affordances-perception in a Gibson sense is quite simply to misunderstand and misrepresent how semiotics conceives the signifier.)

Since the 1950s, it is has seen two major applications. One is in a quasi-scientific mode, where semiotics is used as a theory of communication and information. Early Barthes (e.g., his work on the fashion system) and some of Eco's work (including those parts of A Theory of Semiotics that engaged with information theory). In HCI, Peter Bøgh Andersen has done interesting work in this space.

The other is in a more humanistic and interpretative mode. In this mode, semiotics is commonly used to analyze the deep linguistic/conventional structures that make meaning possible. Foucault used such an approach in his analyses of "epistemes" (which is something like a combination of zeitgeist and a Kuhnian paradigm) in his The Order of Things. Derrida's deconstruction and its application by the Yale School in the 1970s (Geoffrey Hartmann, J. Hillis Miller, Paul de Man) is deeply influenced by semiotics. Jacques Lacan and later Julia Kristeva combined psychoanalysis and semiotics to develop theories of the subject and subjectivity. Roland Barthes used semiotics to brilliant effects in his Images - Music - Text and Mythologies, developing a theory of intertextuality and explicating the mechanisms of modern advertising and other cultural logics of mass media. Barthes' student, Christan Metz, combined semiotics and psychoanalysis to develop seminal theories of film, which are still used and taught today. Dick Hebdige used semiotics as a key approach in his seminal book, Subcultures. Malcolm Barnard has used semiotics to develop sophisticated cultural analyses of fashion. Lev Manovich's highly influential Language of New Media also had the unmistakeable stamp of semiotic analysis. These are but a few seminal examples--and note that many of them are about or strongly connected to design.

In earlier work, I used syntagmatic analysis of interaction designs as a means of analyzing how creativity support software models creativity and, in key ways, also influences contemporary aesthetics. In that work, I found that semiotics helped me analyze human behavior, software task sequences, and aesthetics in a single conceptual vocabulary, allowing me to think seriously about how each influenced the others. I think my use of semiotics in that case was typical, and so I suggest that others might use it in similar ways.

So I agree that semantics and semiotics are not the same thing.

And currently I am more interested in the late Wittgensteinian tradition, as a matter of personal inquiry interests.

But I encourage curious minds to read and form their own opinion, and not to blithely dismiss a tradition of over 100 years that can be linked to some of the most influential writings of the 20th century, or to reduce it all to a crude copy/forerunner of neuroscience or perceptual psychology. Days after the death of Umberto Eco, this is the least we can do.



Suggested readings:

Barnard, Malcolm. 2001. Chapter 7: Semiology, Iconology, and Iconography. In Malcolm Barnard, Approaches to Understanding Visual Culture. Palgrave.

Culler, Jonathan. 1975. Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature. Current edition: Routledge, 2002.

Eco, Umberto. 1979. A Theory of Semiotics. Indiana University Press.



--
Jeffrey Bardzell, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Informatics
Human-Computer Interaction/Design
Affiliated Faculty of the Kinsey Institute for Sex, Gender, and Reproduction
Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing


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