Multimodal Semiotics and Collaborative Design

Theoretical Categories Concepts and references Analytical Implications
Defining Design as
Practice, Product
and Discourse
De + signare, ‘making something, distinguishing it
by a sign, giving it significance, designating its
relation to other things” (Krippendorff 1998)
“The human capacity to shape and make our
environment (…) to serve our needs and give
meaning to our lives” (Heskett 2002: 5)
“Initiation of change in manmade things” (Jones
2009 [1992]: 78)
“Human power of conceiving, planning, and
making products that serve human beings in the
accomplishment of their individual and collective
purposes” (Buchanan 2001a: 9)
Design is a ‘basic human activity’ and a constituent
of social reality (Papanek 1984)
Design is rhetorical, exploratory, emergent,
reflective, ambiguous (Cross 2007 [1999])
“Design has its own distinct ‘things to know, ways
of knowing them, and ways of finding out about
them’” (Cross 2007 [1982], 17).
Design can refer to a process, the result of a
process, products manufactured with the aid of
design, or looks, overall pattern of products
(Walker 2009 [1989])
Design as ‘construction of representations’, the
cognitive approach (Wisser 2006)
Representation is only one of the possible
languages through which design ‘speaks’, the
semantic approach (Krippendorff 1990)
‘Design is making sense of things” (Krippendorff
1990: 8)
I consider design
activity not only as a
professional status, but
a primitive human
activity to organize the
socio-technical
environment.
Therefore, the analysis
of design includes not
only the visual
character, but also the
experiential and
semiotic functions.
Representation is a
language of design,
through which
designers communicate
with users. The
rhetorical character of
design foregrounds
communication, and
symbolic interaction.
Affordances as
meaning and
action potentials
Ecological view: affordances and our ability to
recognize what the world potentially offers to our
senses (Gibson 1986)
User-centered design view: designer and user as
two major determinants of affordance (Norman
1988, 1998, 1999, 2008)
Affordances are not simply properties of the
environment (Chemero 2003)
Affordances are not binary (Gaver 1991), they have
degrees depending on the context of perceptual
information (Mc Genere and Ho 2000).
Social affordances of computer-supported learning
environments (Kreijns and Kirschner 2001)
Both affordances and constraints are contextspecific
potentials, or ‘claims’ (Oliver 2005)
Affordances are
meaning and action
potentials that are
embedded by
designers, and
actualized by users in
certain situations.
Therefore, the
affordances and
constraints are dialogic
constructs, and the
ways in which they
function as
representations results
from their semiotic
nature.
98