New & upcoming titles

i n t e r a c t i o n s / n o v e m b e r + d e c e m b e r 2 0 0 6 The title says it all, but as with much of this amazing book, it takes some context to get the full sense of it. Thankfully, Klaus Krippendorff provides that in a direct, readable, and engaging fashion. The Semantic Turn: A New Foundation for Design is grounded in history, dense and profound. While only 300 pages in length, it is long: It requires and deserves serious study. I believe it should be required reading for anyone interested in design. This is particularly true for those of us in HCI, as Krippendorff locates the human making of the meaning of artifacts (and specifically— as one of a number of levels—by users) at the center of design. The Turn of the title is the observed change in direction that design has been taking for the past decades toward being human-centered; the book is full of won-d e r f u l a c c o u n t s (" s k e t c h e s , " b y Krippendorff's assessment) of the history of various aspects of design. For example, Krippendorff's review of human-centered-ness starts with Protagoras. It also recounts Goethe's battle with Newton over whether color was located in the world (wavelengths) or in what people made of the world (the situation-specific human experience of color): Goethe fought against the then-emerging objectivism that privileged physical measurements over human experiences ; he considered Newton's theory a major epistemological mistake and a disservice to mankind. (p. 41) His historical accounts (e.g., of HCI's heroes, like Wittgenstein, Gibson) are exciting for their clarity and for their inter-weaving in the production of his emerging view. He articulates their positions with simplicity and depth, and with the authority of scholarship. Krippendorff is an excellent source who speaks gently but decisively: He was schooled in industrial design at the Ulm School of Design (Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm), which figures heavily as context in the book. He has been and is a practicing designer. He is now principally a professor in a school of communications no punches, but from his deep understanding offers strong medicine for design, design theory, and designers. This is not, however, a history book. The Semantic Turn …