The Semantic Turn

The semantic turn refers to a paradigm shift in the design of artifacts – industrial, graphic, informational, architectural, and social – from an emphasis on how artifacts ought to function to what they mean to those affected by them – semantics being a concern for meaning. It provides a new foundation for professional design, a detailed design discourse, codifications of proven methods, compelling scientific justifications of its products, and a clear identity for professional designers working within a network of their stakeholders.
The semantic turn suggests a distinction between the technical and user-irrelevant working of artifacts and the human interactions with artifacts, individually, socially, and culturally. Attending to the technical dimension of artifacts, for example, by applied scientists, mechanical or electronic engineers, and experts in economics, production, and marketing, is called technology-centered design. It addresses its subject matter in terms that ordinary users may not understand and applies design criteria users of technology do not care about. Attending to the meanings that users bring to their artifacts, how they use them and talk about them and among various stakeholders, is the domain of human-centered design. For ordinary users, the makeup and technical functioning of artifacts is mere background of what really matters to them.
A prime example for this distinction is the design of personal computers. For most people, the operations inside a computer are incomprehensible, but far from troubling because computers are designed to be experienced primarily through their interfaces. Human-computer interfaces consist of interactively rearrangeable icons, texts, and controls that users can understand in everyday terms and manipulate towards desirable ends. The design of intelligent artifacts suggests that the old adage of “form follows function” is no longer valid – except for the simplest of tools. The semantic turn suggests that human-centered designers’ unique expertise resides in the design of human interfaces with artifacts that are meaningful, easy to use, even enjoyable to experience, be it simple kitchen implements, public service systems, architectural spaces, or information campaigns. Although an automobile should obviously function as a means of transportation, human-centered designers emphasize the experiences of driving, ease of operation, feeling of safety, including the social meanings of driving a particular automobile. As artifacts have to work within many dimensions, human-centered designers must have a sense of and be able to work with all relevant stakeholders addressing different dimensions of the artifact.
"The Semantic Turn": a book and its themes.
The Semantic Turn is also the title of a book by Klaus Krippendorff, Professor of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, cybernetician, degreed designer, and researcher who has published much to advance the science for design. The subtitle of the book, "A new Foundation for Design", suggests a redesign of design practices in a human-centered design culture. Krippendorff takes an encompassing view of design, centering it on the meanings that artifacts acquire and what is or should be designers' primary concern.
"The Semantic Turn" represents an evolution from "Product Semantics" by Krippendorff and Butter, which was defined as "A systematic inquiry into how people attribute meanings to artifacts and interact with them accordingly" and "a vocabulary and methodology for designing artifacts in view of the meanings they could acquire for their users and the communities of their stakeholders". While retaining the emphasis on meaning and on the importance of both theory and practice, "The Semantic Turn" extends the concerns of designers first to the new challenges of design, including the design of ever more intangible artifacts such as services, identities, interfaces, multi-user systems, projects and discourses; and second, to consider the meaning of artifacts in use, in language, in the whole life cycle of the artifact, and in an ecology of artifacts.
Design.
For Krippendorff, design "brings forth what would not come naturally (...); proposes realizable artifacts to others (...) must support the lives of ideally large communities (...) and must make sense to most, ideally to all who have a stake on them". Design thus is intimatelly involved with the meaning that stakeholders attribute to artifacts. Designers "consider possible futures (...) evaluate their desirability (...) and create and work out realistic paths from the present towards desirable futures, and propose them to those that can bring a design to fruition". Acknowledging that all design serves others, "The Semantic Turn" does not treat THE user as statistical fiction, but as knowledgeable stakeholders and necessary partners in human-centered design processes.
Predecessors of human-centeredness.
Krippendorff quotes the Greek philosopher Protagoras who is believed to have been the first to express human-centeredness in words by saying that "Man is the measure of all things, of things that are (...) and of things that are not (...)." Krippendorff goes on to cite the color theory of J. W. von Goethe who exposed Isaac Newton’s spectral theory of colors as epistemologically flawed by pointing out that color is the product of the human eye. Color does not exist without it. Krippendorff refers to the Italian philosopher G. Vico for opposing R. Descartes by claiming we humans know what we have constructed, made up, cognitively, materially, or socially, to the biologists J. Uexküll for his species-specific theory of meaning and H. Maturana and F. Varela for developing a biological foundation of cognition, to the psychologist J. J. Gibson for his conception of affordance, which acknowledges that our environment does not account for our perception, it merely affords our sensory-motor coordinations or it does not; and to the anthropological linguist B. L. Whorf for his recognition that our perceptions are correlated with language, its grammar and vocabulary. Most important, Krippendorff allies himself with L. Wittgenstein’s definition of meaning as use, culminating in the axiom that "Humans do not see and act on the physical qualities of things, but on what they mean to them".
Meaning.
Attributing meaning to something follows from sensing it, and is a prelude to action. " One always acts according to the meaning of whatever one faces " and the consequences of these actions in turn become part of the meanings of what one interacts with. Meanings are always someone's construction and depend on context and culture. The same artifact may invoke different meanings at different times, in different contexts of use, and for different people. To design artifacts for use by others calls on designers to understand the understanding of others, a "second order understanding" that is fundamentally unlike the understanding of physical things. Since meanings cannot be observed directly, designers need to carefully observe the actions that imply certain meanings; involve themselves in dialog with their stakeholders; and invite them to participate in the design process.
Meaning of artifacts in use.
People acquire the meanings of artifacts by their interfacing with them, where meanings become anticipated usabilities. Krippendorff does not limit the concept of interfaces to human computer interactions, however. For him, the concept applies to any artifact one faces. To users, artifacts are perceived as affordances, as the kind of interactions they enable or prohibit. Thus scissors and coffee cups are experienced as interfaces, just as personal computers are. Their physical or computational makeup become background phenomena to use. The meaning of an artifact in use is then "" the range of imaginable senses and actions that users have reasons to expect" ". Ideal interfaces are self-evident and "" intrinsically motivating interactions between users and their artifacts" ".
Drawing on Heidegger's explorations of the human use of technology, Krippendorff argues that all artifacts must be designed to afford three stages of use: initial recognition, intermediate exploration, and ideally, unproblematic reliance. The latter is achieved when the artifact is so incorporated into the user's world that it becomes hardly noticed, is taken for granted while looking through it to what is to be accomplished. Recognition involves users' categorizations, how close the artifact is to the "ideal type" of its kind. Exploration is facilitated by informatives such as state indicators, progress reports, confirmations of actions and readiness, alarm signals, close correlations between actions and their expected effects, maps of possibilities, instructions, error messages, and multi-sensory feedback. Users' intrinsic motivation arises from reliance, the seemingly effortless, unproblematic yet skillful engagement with artifacts free of disruptions. A well designed interface enables unambiguous recognition, effective exploration, and leads to enjoyable reliance. To accomplish these transitions, human-centered designers need to involve second-order understanding of users' cognitive models, cultural habits, and competencies.
Typically, users approach their artifacts with very different competencies. "The Semantic Turn" offers the possibility of accommodating these differences by allowing the design of several semantic layers. For example, contemporary Xerox machines exhibit one layer for making copies, another for clearing paper jams, a third for replacing defective parts by trained service personnel, and a fourth is reserved for the factory repair of replaced components.
Meaning of artifacts in language.
""The fate of all artifacts is decided in language" ", says Krippendorff. Indeed, designers must pay attention to the narratives in which an artifact appears as soon as it enters the conversations among stakeholders, bystanders, critics, and users, to the names that categorize the artifact as being of one kind or another, and to the adjectives that direct perception to particular qualities (is it a "fast" car? a "clumsy" cell phone? a "high class" dress?). Such characterizations can make or break an artifact and designers cannot ignore how people talk about them. Krippendorff proposes that "artifacts should be designed so that their interfaces are [easily] narratable" and fit into social or communicational relationships.
The "character" of an artifact – the set of adjectives deemed appropriate to it – can be assessed by means of semantic differential scales – seven point scales between polar opposite attributes such as elegant––––graceless; by categorizing free associations elicited from users, whether as first impressions or after extended use; by examining the content of stories people tell about the artifacts for implied judgments; or by pair comparisons of similar artifacts. Such methods give human-centered designers ways to quantify meanings, to work towards defined design criteria, including pursuing quantifiable aesthetic objectives, and justify a design to potential stakeholders.
Language permeates all of human life, including with artifacts. This applies not only to the users of artifacts but also to their designers. The narratives that evolve within design teams determine the direction a design is taking, and might end up convincing stakeholders to go along with a design project or oppose it, well before it is built, and influence designers in turn. What we know of current artifacts, ancient ones, outdated ones, antiques or museum pieces come to us in the form of stories. Designers need to analyse them for, as Krippendorff asserts, " The meanings that artifacts acquire in use are largely framed in language".
Meaning in the lives of artifacts.
Here, Krippendorff invites designers to consider artifacts in their whole life cycle. In the case of industrial products, the life cycle might start with an initial idea, then followed by design, engineering, production, sales, use, storage, maintenance and finally retirement, as recycled or as waste. Well, not so "finally;" designers may learn much about a product's performance, unintended uses, unexpected problems, and resulting social consequences, which can serve to improve the design of the next generation of that product – design never ends. In each phase of the life cycle of an artifact, that artifact will have to support diverse but subjectively meaningful interfaces for different communities of stakeholders. In such stakeholder networks, artifacts need to proceed from one to the next: "" no artifact can be realized within a culture without being meaningful to those who can move it through its various definitions" ".
Meaning in an ecology of artifacts.
Dictionaries tend to define ecology as multi-species interaction in a common environment, the species being animals and plants. Humans, however, have created a perhaps greater diversity of "species of artifacts" than has nature. Krippendorff observes that species of artifacts too are born, grow in size and number, diversify into sub-species, associate with other species, adapt to each other and to their human environment, and either reproduce, evolve, or disappear – just as in nature. Species of artifacts may compete, cooperate or be parasitic on other artifacts. For an example of the latter, consider spam, which thrives in the email ecosystem and could not exist outside it. Whereas species of animals and plants interact with one another in their own terms, species of artifacts are brought into interaction through human agency. People arrange artifacts, like the furniture at home; connect them into networks, like computes in the internet; form large cultural cooperatives, like hospitals full of medical equipment, drugs, and treatments; retire one species in favor of another, like typewriters gave way to personal computers; or change their ecological meanings, like horses, originally used for work and transportation, found an ecological niche in sports.
In an ecology of artifacts, the meaning of one consists of the possible interactions with other artifacts: cooperation, competition (substitution), domination or submission, leading technological development, like computers do right now, supporting the leaders, like the gadgets found in computer stores. Similarly, roads and gas stations follow the development of automobiles and participate in a very large cultural complex, including the design of cities and the distribution of work, and affect nature through depletion of resources, creating waste and CO2 emissions. Clearly, "" designers who can handle the ecological meaning of their proposals have a better chance of keeping their designs alive" ".
Towards a science for design.
In 1969, Nobel laureate Herbert Simon called for a science of the artificial. Natural scientists, he argued, are concerned with what exists, whereas designers are concerned with what should be and how to achieve it. His conception of design was shaped by rational decision theory and early conceptions of computational logic, hence limited largely to technology-centered design. Krippendorff added the following contrasts to Simon’s:
A science for design makes three contributions to design:
Design research.
Generally, research is any inquiry that generates communicable knowledge. Human-centered design research typically involves
Design methods.
Human-centered design methods may aim at:
Validations of semantic claims.
In a science for design, validation consists of generating compelling justifications for the claims that designers must make regarding the meaning, virtue, potential reality, costs and benefits of their design for particular communities. Inasmuch as any design can prove itself only in the future, "post factum", and with the collaboration of others, human-centered design is justifiable only by means of plausible arguments Issue-Based Information System that motivate its stakeholders to realize or use that design. The science for design, always concerned with not yet observable contingencies, cannot provide the simple truth claims of the kind that natural scientist aspire to for their theories. But it can provide several other human-centered ways to back the claims designers need to make:
Reception of "product semantics" and "The Semantic Turn".
Since its coinage in 1984, the use of “product semantics” has mushroomed. In 2009, a Google search identified over 18,000 documents referring to it. However, it has been critiqued by advocates of a more critical approach to design as overly simplistic.
The semantics of artifacts has become of central importance in courses taught at leading design departments of many universities all over the world, among them at the Arizona State University; the Cranbrook Academy of Arts; The Ohio State University; the Savannah College of Art and Design; the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, USA; the Hochschule fűr Gestaltung Offenbach in Germany; the Hongik University in Seoul, Korea; the Indian Institute of Technology in Mumbai; the Musashino Art University in Tokyo, Japan; the National Taiwan University of Science and Technology; the University of Art and Design in Helsinki, Finland; and more. It has also permeated other disciplines, notably ergonomics, marketing, cognitive engineering.
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"The Semantic Turn" has been translated into Japanese and is currently being translated into German.