Graphics Reference
In-Depth Information
aesthetic-communicative features. The design
of computer graphics interfaces for industry,
business, and media make a significant part of
material culture. Creation and discussion of the
new programs for software employs conceptual
structures of semiotics, while its essential no-
tions such as images, signs, icons, or metaphors
are effective for explaining conceptual models of
abstract functions.
Klaus Krippendorff (1990) examined epis-
temological difficulties in applying traditional
semiotics to the industrial design and product
semantics. According to Krippendorff, semiotic
signs, symbols, and linguistic expressions are the
products of human consciousness, so they cannot
be considered the same for everyone. In construc-
tivist way, he would approach a new product with
curiosity, as a variation from what is already known
and what he wants it to be. Krippendorff wrote that
designers are facing challenges resulting from the
progression of artifacts that add new design cri-
teria. This trajectory of artifacts include products
(with their utility, functionality, and aesthetics);
goods, services, and identities (marketability,
symbolic diversity, and folk or local aesthetics);
interfaces (interactivity, understandability, adapt-
ability); multiuser networks (informativeness,
connectivity, accessibility); projects (social viabil-
ity, directionality, commitment); and discourses
(generativity, re-articulability, solidarity).
By comparing the designer's intentions and
user's perceptions of some technologically inno-
vative products, one can optimize the quality of
new products by reducing its design mismatches.
Product semantics means an inquiry about the
meaning of objects, their symbolic qualities and
their psychological, social and cultural context.
For example, a search was made about street
benches, for a user oriented, optimal combination
of formal elements for street furniture, this means,
benches placed in a town environment (Vihma,
1992). Semantic analysis concerned the similarity
of the benches' style, weight, price and solidity
and the users' preferences in terms of comfort,
ergonomics, personal space, and material. This
search provided information about how people
experience new furniture and served as a start-
ing point for the new design and the production
of benches.
BIOSEMIOTICS
The study of biosemiosis examines communica-
tion and information in living organisms (Em-
meche, Kull, Stjernfelt 2002). Biosemiotics has
been studying biology not exclusively in terms
of physical and chemical processes; researchers
interpret living systems as sign systems, which
generate meaning (Emmeche, Kull, Stjernfelt
2002: 26). Biosemiotics is built on a system of
signs, symbols, and icons to convey meaning and
communicate knowledge about natural processes
or events with the metaphors, analogies, and a
variety of the biology data visualization tools.
In the arts, pictorial signs may be arbitrary, for
example showing resemblance of a stimulus to its
symbol, or conventional, which are often unrelated.
Biosemiotics thus examines communication and
signification in living systems in terms of the
production, action, and interpretation of signs.
In terms of semiotics signs and signification
transfer information, meaning, and interpreta-
tion between people only. Biosemiotics is the
study of signification about generating content,
meaning, and interpretation of signs not only in
humans but also in other living organisms that
produce and receive signs. Liz Stillwaggon with
Swan and Louis Goldberg (2010) explored why
and how certain features of environment be-
come meaningful to the organism. They address
neurobiological intermediary function between
the environment and the consequent behavior
of the organism and discuss what constitutes a
biosemiotic system in terms of their concept of
meaning-making brain-objects.
