Semiotic Foundations of HCI and UX Design - Cross-Cultural Human-Computer Interaction and User Experience Design - page 25

FIGURE 2.4 Kayak air ticket finder. Source: http://www.kayak.com , cit. 2013-05-18.
KAYAK screenshot reprinted with permission from KAYAK Software Corporation.

by their grammars toward different types of observations and different evaluations of
externally similar acts of observation, and hence are not equivalent as observers but
must arrive at somewhat different views of the world” (Whorf, 2012, pp. 282-283).
Or, as Halliday (1985) formulated, “[g]rammar goes beyond formal rules of cor-
rectness. It is a means of representing patterns of experience [

]. It enables human
beings to build a mental picture of reality, to make sense of their experience of what
goes on around them and inside them” (Ibid., p. 101). By expressing in a differ-
ent language, we accent different objects and different experiences, which enables
us to get different insights into the world we live in. This change of perspective is
analogous, when we shift from the traditional system of reference of HCI based on
computer science to a semiotic and linguistic system, which has native tools to work
with meaning.
“Meanings [however] belong to culture, rather than to specific semiotic modes.
And the way meanings are mapped across different semiotic modes, the way some
things can, for instance, be 'said' either visually or verbally, others only visually,
again others only verbally, is also culturally and historically specific. [

...

] what is
expressed in language through the choice between different word classes and clause
structures, may, in visual communication, be expressed through the choice between
different uses of colour or different compositional structures. And this will affect
meaning. Expressing something verbally or visually makes a difference” (Kress and

...