The Semantic Turn - a New Foundation for Design Review

TZ70AA03-2001 Cross-platform Publishing and Content Management

Sami Reinilä

Summary

The Semantic Turn is an academic in depth look into design profession and science of design. It combines design with psychology, artifacts, and ecologies, and explains design process with several diagrams and real world examples. Definitely worth reading.

The book examines science for design, which gives designers grounds on which to state their claims and clarify thought processes in their designs. It reviews history of semantic concerns in design and presents their philosophical roots. It examines new social and technological challenges that professional designers face today. It also gives interesting insights into industrial design, where user’s were thought as blind followers of orders dictated by the designers and technology. It provides concepts and a vocabularies for designers to understand more traditional disciplines of engineering and design, ergonomics, ecology, cognitive science, information technology, management, and marketing. It explains how stakeholders matter and how to communicate design decisions and influence design stakeholders.

The book is written by Klaus Krippendorff. He is a recognized designer and distinguished scholar of communication and language use.

First Impressions and Thoughts about the Book

The book has very academic feel to it. The layout is plain with big Times New Roman, few images and small marginals. Overall the readability is not to my liking and definately not good for tired eyes. The language is academic with long breath taking sentences, and it sometimes pays too much attention to details. I guess that’s how academic books are written and laid out. Anyway a strange first reaction for a book which is all about design.

Layout dislikes are forgotten when Kippendorf’s strong writing and excellent knowledge of design is revealed chapter by chapter. It’s hard to disagree with the book. All the research and findings are well presented, and backed by a lot of examples throughout design history. Kippendorf presents himself in a way that makes one think himself as a nice academic chap, overall most examples and findings are positive.

While it was great to read about industrial design and the early days of computers I wish more modern day examples about interfaces, UI design and gadgets of our times. Most examples are old, Xerox photocopiers and printers, Apple UI’s from the 90’s and so on. Current mobile device revolution and it’s emerging multi-device multi-screen design needs more attention in the forms of design, stakeholders and ecologies. Of course the same design principles in the book apply, but it would also give an easier entry point and enchance the feeling that Kippendorf’s research and methods are up with the time (which they are, but why not underline it). An update chapter about these would make a good addition into the book.

Main Issues

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 " [Krippendorff (2006), pp. 58]. Meanings are always someone's construction and depend on context and culture.

Artifacts

Artifacts are not just subjects and tangible things. The Semantic Turn extends the concerns of designers to challenges of design with intangible artifacts: services, identities, interfaces, multi-user systems, projects and discourses. It also covers the meaning of artifacts in use, in language, in the life cycle of the artifact, and in an ecology of artifacts.

Ecologies

The book observes ecologies of arfifacts. How species of artifacts are born, grown in size and number, how they are diversified into sub-species and associated with other species. How they adapt to each other and to their environment. And how artifacts either reproduce, evolve, or disappear. Kippendorf also examines the design process and stakeholders can be influenced to enchance and provide support ecologies.

Second Order Understanding

In order to design artifacts for use by others the designer needs to understand the understanding of others. This is defined as a second order understanding, and it’s fundamentally unlike the understanding of physical things. Meanings cannot be observed directly, so designers need to observe the actions that imply certain meanings, they need to involve themselves in dialog with their stakeholders and users. They need to invite them to participate in the design process.

Examples

There are several examples of design, theory, proof of consepts, and human behaviour in the book. They provide great examples throughout design history. They show many interesting studies including billboards, cars and trucking, architecture and human-computer interaction.

Strengths

The book is a great resource for design, it’s research and science. It lays out the ways that modern user centric design is professionally argumented, implemented and re-designed. It studies and shows how overwhelmingly design is around us in everything from kitchen appliances, user interfaces, societies, and in behavioral patterns. It goes deep into meanings explaining human-centeredness, second order understanding, artifacts, artifacts in use, artifacts in language and the ecology of artifacts. Design process has good explanations including how to influence stakeholders in projects. There are also many real world examples from several different ‘fields’ of design.

Weaknesses

The book feels a bit far reaching in it’s academic argumenting and long explanations. Still it’s hard to disagree with the book. Research is thoroughly documented and footnoted. More modern concrete examples are needed. This would also make reading easier to understand, and provide variation for the overall style and presentation. Also more examples of bad design and failures, for that is the way to learn. The book is a bit too much in one read, especially if one is not used to academic writings.

Who the book is for, why to read it

I recommend the book for everyone who is interested about design and it’s effects on people and desired behaviour. This includes the obvious designers, developers and consultants. Also people who like to learn about designer’s work, or who need to or want to know something about the design process benefit reading the book. It can be read as a thorough research of design, or flipped though to understand parts of design or checking out interesting examples. Especially e-book format is great for searching examples.