Joining Forces | University of Art and Design Helsinki | September 22-24, 2005 JUST USING THE ELECTRONIC DAILY OBJECTS: NEW TECHNOLOGIES AND/OR/FOR THE USERS Olavo Bessa, Politecnico of Milan, Italy Introduction Despite of the many efforts to consider the users when designing interfaces (as it may be seen by following some studies carried out in Human Computer Interaction, User Centred Design, Usability, etc.), a lot of interface design practices already disregard the user’s point of view. To ignoring users has as a consequence, the use of some interfaces that does not correspond with the users’ capacity to interpret them. The aim of this article is mainly to show that some decisions regarding the interface layout of some electronic daily objects are not in agreement with the capacities of the users to interpret them (sometimes users are unable to formulate any hypothesis about the functioning of the house appliance’s interface). Instead of planning by considering the interface and the users as detached parts, designers should consider them as a continuous inseparable phenomenon. The signifiers and the signifieds The words signifier and signified are very often used by linguists – overall semiologists (Saussurre, 1995) –, semioticians (Peirce, 1878) as well as by psychoanalysts (Miller, 1987). Although it could be argued that these both terms are slightly different in meaning for each of those theories, it will be enough to explain the adopted concepts within this study by considering the purpose of this paper. It does not matter if there are shared common meanings among those theories or not. The term signifier was adopted to designate any element that acts as a stimulus before to launch the signifying processes, i.e., signifier is any element that may provoke a process of signification, even if these elements are not already captured by an observer. The term signified was assumed to name the signifier that was captured and is already being processed by an observer toward a representation, i.e., signified is any element from the real that is being or has already been transformed into reality. In these assumptions “real” is defined by the block of accessible elements (signifiers), which are available to be appropriated by an observer, and “reality” is assumed as its representation (signifieds). A block of signifieds is a corresponding model of some part of the real shaped by an observer in a more or less accurate and a more or less truthful way. In other words: the real is made of signifiers, while reality is shaped by an observer to create a correspondent model of the real by means of signifieds. The construction of the meaning From a static point of view, the meaning is established like a diacritic block of discreet elements or, to be more precise, the symbolic language is constructed from “elements that they each have their own value only when they are put in relationship with at least another element,” (Miller, 1987 p.28); hence, every single element is devoid of significance. The meaning of an element – or signifieds – is constructed from the perceptual capacities and from the sensibility to the differences existing among the diacritic elements – or signifiers –. The choice of the signifiers that will be translated into signifieds is determined by both the capacity of an observer to identify relationships among elements during his own meaning construction and his capacity to correlate these elements with a restricted possibility of significance.