Semiotic Engineering – An Opportunity or an Opportunity Missed?

Abstract

Semiotics has to be understood as the conceptual undergirding of any form of design and engineering. While it does not provide operational means, it rather demands understanding of design and engineering aspects in a broad sense. Without the underlying semiotics, design and engineering remain mere problem-solving activities, and therefore will fall short of achieving their formative function. Through design, interaction languages, pertinent to engineering, contribute to shaping culture. In the end, semiotics contributes to making such languages available. The world before the computer and the world after the computer, including the ubiquitous smartphone, are not only technologically different, but also essentially culturally different. With the smartphone we progress from mere data processing to machine learning based interactive computation. The hybrid human-interactive computation has anticipatory characteristics.