Reflection on the role of semiotic engineering in co-design of interaction

This article reflects upon the use of semiotic engineering in in- teraction design processes. The role of semiotics in HCI has been extensively explored and evaluation methods have been developed to facilitate the pragmatic application of semiotics to human-computer interaction. These methods can be ap- plied in both formative and summative evaluation strategies and, especially when used in for formative evaluation pur- poses, they adequately feed back into the design process. However, with the growing emphasis on co-design, we see the need of supporting the design process with a frame of reference informed by the semiotic principles, thus shifting the contribution of semiotics to interaction design i.e. from an evaluation standpoint to a design decision role. We build upon a case study to explore the interplay between the semi- otic inspection method and the interaction design process laying the ground for future work in this direction.