Clarisse Sieckenius de Souza

A Journey Through Cultures addresses one of the hottest topics in contemporary HCI: cultural diversity amongst users. For a number of years the HCI community has been investigating alternatives to enhance the design of cross-cultural systems. Most contributions to date have followed either a ‘design for each’ or a ‘design for all’ strategy.A Journey Through Cultures takes a very different approach. Proponents of CVM – the Cultural Viewpoint Metaphors perspective – the authors invite HCI practitioners to think of how to expose and communicate the idea of cultural diversity. A detailed case study is included which assesses the metaphors’ potential in cross-cultural design and evaluation. The results show that cultural viewpoint metaphors have strong epistemic power, leveraged by a combination of theoretic foundations coming from Anthropology, Semiotics and the authors’ own work in HCI and Semiotic Engineering.Luciana Salgado, Carla Leitão and Clarisse de Souza are members of SERG, the Semiotic Engineering Research Group at the Departamento de Informática of Rio de Janeiro's Pontifical Catholic University (PUC-Rio).

A Journey Through Cultures addresses one of the hottest topics in contemporary HCI: cultural diversity amongst users. For a number of years the HCI community has been investigating alternatives to enhance the design of cross-cultural systems. Most contributions to date have followed either a ‘design for each’ or a ‘design for all’ strategy.A Journey Through Cultures takes a very different approach. Proponents of CVM – the Cultural Viewpoint Metaphors perspective – the authors invite HCI practitioners to think of how to expose and communicate the idea of cultural diversity. A detailed case study is included which assesses the metaphors’ potential in cross-cultural design and evaluation. The results show that cultural viewpoint metaphors have strong epistemic power, leveraged by a combination of theoretic foundations coming from Anthropology, Semiotics and the authors’ own work in HCI and Semiotic Engineering.Luciana Salgado, Carla Leitão and Clarisse de Souza are members of SERG, the Semiotic Engineering Research Group at the Departamento de Informática of Rio de Janeiro's Pontifical Catholic University (PUC-Rio).

This book presents the SigniFYI Suite of conceptual and methodological tools, designed to uncover meanings inscribed in software, their origins, intent and consequences to identify and trace correlating patterns; from software design and development to software use and experience.Based on the study of Semiotic Engineering, the book advances the e study of Human-Centered Computing (HCC), inviting professionals, researchers, teachers and students to reflect upon how subjective and cultural values manifest themselves through software models, programs and user interfaces.Theauthors weave a mesh of technical, theoretical and philosophical considerations of what it means to build and use software, exploring what we (professionals and non-professionals) mean by the pieces of software we design and develop, as well as what pieces of software mean to end-users and others.Explicitly dedicated to software designers, developers and users, Software Developers as Users is a provocative view of socio-technical communication in the digital age.

This book presents the SigniFYI Suite of conceptual and methodological tools, designed to uncover meanings inscribed in software, their origins, intent and consequences to identify and trace correlating patterns; from software design and development to software use and experience.Based on the study of Semiotic Engineering, the book advances the e study of Human-Centered Computing (HCC), inviting professionals, researchers, teachers and students to reflect upon how subjective and cultural values manifest themselves through software models, programs and user interfaces.Theauthors weave a mesh of technical, theoretical and philosophical considerations of what it means to build and use software, exploring what we (professionals and non-professionals) mean by the pieces of software we design and develop, as well as what pieces of software mean to end-users and others.Explicitly dedicated to software designers, developers and users, Software Developers as Users is a provocative view of socio-technical communication in the digital age.

Semiotic engineering was originally proposed as a semiotic approach to designing user interface languages. Over the years, with research done at the Department of Informatics of the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, it evolved into a semiotic theory of human-computer interaction (HCI). It views HCI as computer-mediated communication between designers and users at interaction time. The system speaks for its designers in various types of conversations specified at design time. These conversations communicate the designers' understanding of who the users are, what they know the users want or need to do, in which preferred ways, and why. The designers' message to users includes even the interactive language in which users will have to communicate back with the system in order to achieve their specific goals. Hence, the process is, in fact, one of communication about communication, or metacommunication. Semiotic engineering has two methods to evaluate the quality of metacommunication in HCI: the semiotic inspection method (SIM) and the communicability evaluation method (CEM). Up to now, they have been mainly used and discussed in technical contexts, focusing on how to detect problems and how to improve the metacommunication of specific systems. In this book, Clarisse de Souza and Carla Leitão discuss how SIM and CEM, which are both qualitative methods, can also be used in scientific contexts to generate new knowledge about HCI. The discussion goes into deep considerations about scientific methodology, calling the reader's attention to the essence of qualitative methods in research and the kinds of results they can produce. To illustrate their points, the authors present an extensive case study with a free open-source digital audio editor called Audacity. They show how the results obtained with a triangulation of SIM and CEM point at new research avenues not only for semiotic engineering and HCI but also for other areas of computer science such as softwareengineering and programming. Table of Contents: Introduction / Essence of Semiotic Engineering / Semiotic Engineering Methods / Case Study with Audacity / Lessons Learned with Semiotic Engineering Methods / The Near Future of Semiotic Engineering

A theory of HCI that uses concepts from semiotics and computer science to focus on the communication between designers and users during interaction.In The Semiotic Engineering of Human-Computer Interaction, Clarisse Sieckenius de Souza proposes an account of HCI that draws on concepts from semiotics and computer science to investigate the relationship between user and designer. Semiotics is the study of signs, and the essence of semiotic engineering is the communication between designers and users at interaction time; designers must somehow be present in the interface to tell users how to use the signs that make up a system or program. This approach, which builds on-but goes further than-the currently dominant user-centered approach, allows designers to communicate their overall vision and therefore helps users understand designs-rather than simply which icon to click.According to de Souza's account, both designers and users are interlocutors in an overall communication process that takes place through an interface of words, graphics, and behavior. Designers must tell users what they mean by the artifact they have created, and users must understand and respond to what they are being told. By coupling semiotic theory and engineering, de Souza's approach to HCI design encompasses the principles, the materials, the processes, and the possibilities for producing meaningful interactive computer system discourse and achieves a broader perspective than cognitive, ethnographic, or ergonomic approaches.De Souza begins with a theoretical overview and detailed exposition of the semiotic engineering account of HCI. She then shows how this approach can be applied specifically to HCI evaluation and design of online help systems, customization and end-user programming, and multiuser applications. Finally, she reflects on the potential and opportunities for research in semiotic engineering.