The semantic turn refers to a paradigm shift in the design of artifacts – industrial, graphic, informational, architectural, and social – from an emphasis on how artifacts ought to function to what they mean to those affected by them – semantics being a concern for meaning. It provides a new foundation for professional design, a detailed design discourse, codifications of proven methods, compelling scientific justifications of its products, and a clear identity for professional designers working within a network of their stakeholders. The semantic turn suggests a distinction between the technical and user-irrelevant working of artifacts and the human interactions with artifacts, individually, socially, and culturally. Attending to the technical dimension of artifacts, for example, by applied scientists, mechanical or electronic engineers, and experts in economics, production, and marketing, is called technology-centered design. It addresses its subject matter in terms that ordinary users may not understand and applies design criteria users of technology do not care about. Attending to the meanings that users bring to their artifacts, how they use them and talk about them and among various stakeholders, is the domain of human-centered design. For ordinary users, the makeup and technical functioning of artifacts is mere background of what really matters to them. A prime example for this distinction is the design of personal computers. For most people, the operations inside a computer are incomprehensible, but far from troubling because computers are designed to be experienced primarily through their interfaces. Human-computer interfaces consist of interactively rearrangeable icons, texts, and controls that users can understand in everyday terms and manipulate towards desirable ends. The design of intelligent artifacts suggests that the old adage of “form follows function” is no longer valid – except for the simplest of tools. The semantic turn suggests that human-centered designers’ unique expertise resides in the design of human interfaces with artifacts that are meaningful, easy to use, even enjoyable to experience, be it simple kitchen implements, public service systems, architectural spaces, or information campaigns. Although an automobile should obviously function as a means of transportation, human-centered designers emphasize the experiences of driving, ease of operation, feeling of safety, including the social meanings of driving a particular automobile. As artifacts have to work within many dimensions, human-centered designers must have a sense of and be able to work with all relevant stakeholders addressing different dimensions of the artifact.
The Semantic Turn: a book and its themes The Semantic Turn is also the title of a book by Klaus Krippendorff, Professor of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, cybernetician, degreed designer, and researcher who has published much to advance the science for design. The subtitle of the book, A new Foundation for Design, suggests a redesign of design practices in a human-centered design culture. Krippendorff takes an encompassing view of design, centering it on the meanings that artifacts acquire and what is or should be designers' primary concern.
The Semantic Turn represents an evolution from "Product Semantics" by Krippendorff and Butter, which was defined as "A systematic inquiry into how people attribute meanings to artifacts and interact with them accordingly" and "a vocabulary and methodology for designing artifacts in view of the meanings they could acquire for their users and the communities of their stakeholders". While retaining the emphasis on meaning and on the importance of both theory and practice, The Semantic Turn extends the concerns of designers first to the new challenges of design, including the design of ever more intangible artifacts such as services, identities, interfaces, multi-user systems, projects and discourses; and second, to consider the meaning of artifacts in use, in language, in the whole life cycle of the artifact, and in an ecology of artifacts.
Design For Krippendorff, design "brings forth what would not come naturally (...); proposes realizable artifacts to others (...) must support the lives of ideally large communities (...) and must make sense to most, ideally to all who have a stake on them". Design thus is intimatelly involved with the meaning that stakeholders attribute to artifacts. Designers "consider possible futures (...) evaluate their desirability (...) and create and work out realistic paths from the present towards desirable futures, and propose them to those that can bring a design to fruition". Acknowledging that all design serves others, The Semantic Turn does not treat THE user as statistical fiction, but as knowledgeable stakeholders and necessary partners in human-centered design processes.
Predecessors of human-centeredness Krippendorff quotes the Greek philosopher Protagoras who is believed to have been the first to express human-centeredness in words by saying that "Man is the measure of all things, of things that are (...) and of things that are not (...)." Krippendorff goes on to cite the color theory of J. W. von Goethe who exposed Isaac Newton's spectral theory of colors as epistemologically flawed by pointing out that color is the product of the human eye. Color does not exist without it. Krippendorff refers to the Italian philosopher G. Vico for opposing R. Descartes by claiming we humans know what we have constructed, made up, cognitively, materially, or socially, to the biologists J. Uexküll for his species-specific theory of meaning and H. Maturana and F. Varela for developing a biological foundation of cognition, to the psychologist J. J. Gibson for his conception of affordance, which acknowledges that our environment does not account for our perception, it merely affords our sensory-motor coordinations or it does not; and to the anthropological linguist B. L. Whorf for his recognition that our perceptions are correlated with language, its grammar and vocabulary. Most important, Krippendorff allies himself with L. Wittgenstein's definition of meaning as use, culminating in the axiom that Humans do not see and act on the physical qualities of things, but on what they mean to them.
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