Thirteenth International Conference on Design Principles & Practices

Abstract

In this paper, the author calls for a new approach to semiotics of design in order to overcome the limitations of trans-linguistic explanations in the current design semiotics. Agentive semiotics (Niño 2015) was presented with the potential to account for design semiotics. The benefits of the new approach are mainly oriented to take into account the agent (user) with greater emphasis in the semiotic analysis of the context. The agentive turn in design semiotics opens the gates to an enhanced knowledge about the user’s process of signification and offers in-depth explanations and extended theoretical evidence to clarify the notion of “context”. The semiotic analysis of the context is useful in analysing the circumstances in which agents will use artifacts, whether it is an established context or a new context proposed by the designer. For example, the context of calls radically changes with the introduction of cell phones. The methodology is a theoretical approach. The method is mainly a conceptual analysis in that it pretends delineate a preliminary theory. It’s a descriptive approach about relationship between users, artifacts, and context. The results are obtained from a theoretical framework and from a conceptual analysis of the structure of the contexts, mainly based on Niño, 2015. Examples of applications will be given without empirical validation but instead rigorous descriptive review from students’ exercises of MA in Design at Universidad Nacional.