Semiotic approaches to user interface design

In April 2000, during the annual ACM CHI Conference in The Hague, a group of sixteen people got together in a one-day workshop to discuss semiotic approaches to user interface languages. For some of the participants, this was the second interdisciplinary meeting where they got together to discuss cross-fertilization opportunities for Semiotics and Computer Science. Four years before CHI2000, they had met in Germany, for a Dahstuhl Seminar on Informatics and Semiotics [1]. The 1996 Seminar was organized by Peter B. Andersen, Mihai NAdin and Frieder Nake, who then planted the seed of what our workshop grew to be in The Hague. The Dagstuhl group was larger, so that numerous intersections between semiotics and Computer Science in general were discussed. The CHI2000 workshop group was much smaller and focused on one particular issue: can Semiotics contribute to HCI design? If it can, what kinds of contribution should we expect and how can they be concretely achieved? The response to a call for position papers was very encouraging to the organizers, two of which had been in Dagstuhl in 1996. The ®nal group of participants included experienced HCI researchers and practitioners, as well as experts in Semiotics. Researchers interested in other ®elds related to Semiotics and HCI such as Arti®cial Intelligence, Design Rationale and Computer Art were also present. We were also pleased to have PhD students from different parts of the world who had found stimulating connections between Semiotics and their research topics. A report on the activities we were involved with during the workshop was published in ACM SIGCHI Bulletin [2]. This Special Issue of Knowledge-Based Systems gives the readers interested in representation and communication issues a chance to assess a wide range of perspectives on what Semiotics has in common not only with HCI, but also with Computer Science in general. For the non-expert reader, we should start by broadly de®ning Semiotics as a discipline devoted to the study of communication: representations, their interpretation and usage. Considering the theoretic abstraction that describes all computer programs as symbol-processing machines, Semiotics and Computer Science share a fundamental interest on representations and their interpretation. The use of representations in dialogs and discourse that are meant to achieve effects in a symbol-processing machine is the central issue we investigate in human±computer interaction. Nevertheless, the algorithmic symbol processing performed by computers and semiosis (the kind of human processing that takes place in natural …