Abstract 46: Research in pragmatic semiotic and design...(ACCEPTED)

The design studies are a research domain that attempts to define its own problematic and research tools to treat the complexity of the field in the best way.
As most researches concerned by practise, these studies meet some difficulties to keep their distances from the tools already developed in both the laboratory and the industry.
According to our study of the literature, the design studies are issued from the broader field of the Visual Studies, itself a part of the Cultural Studies.

Although theoretical approaches of the design are not a new thing, most of its opponents claim that academic and scientific approaches are not compatible with the creativity process. Nevertheless, research in design has began more than a century ago and is accessible through many books, journals and even designers essays.

Among many others, we are thinking to the books of Tilley (1991); Margelin, V and Buchanan, V (1995) ; the books of Miller A & Lupton, E (1996); Glassie (1999); Guidot, R. (2006); Burdek, B. (2006). Concerning the journals, we are thinking to the Design issues (history, theory and critics); Design Studies (The international journal of design), The journal of Material culture; Studies in design and Material Culture or to quote some french journals: Design Recherche, Design Magazine, Design. Concerning the professionals, we can quote the work of Véronique Vienne and Michael Bierut (1994) and the essay of William Drenttel and Steven Heller (1994, 1997) as well.
We must notice that these researches are mainly borrowing their methods from sociology, anthropology, ethnology and semiotic.

This overview has allowed us to see that the field of Design Studies is focusing on three main parts that are not articulated very often: the design and production field, the product in itself, and finally the reception process. Since a few years, thanks to the participative design, researchers are interested by the feedback process that appears between users and designers.

In our research centre (CRICC), we are hypothesising that the lack of a clear conceptualisation in this domain is due to a lack of a theoretical framework able to encompass a research object that is simultaneously dynamic, in interaction and within a moving context.

According to our research hypothesis, the study of the product within its open context, during the action and interaction process is the best topic to develop an adaptated conceptual framework. In this domain, S. Vihma’s work is very close to our approach.

In this context, we are attempting to develop a pragmatic and interactionnist semiotic approach in order to study the connection between the programme of use integrated in the products by the designer and the user habits in action.

But, how to study actions and from which conceptual framework and methodology?
How to study the action process of the product upon the user and at the same time the impact of the user on the product?

In this domain, the activity theory, the cognitive psychology and the ecological psychology are offering interesting conceptual backgrounds that need to be articulated to match with applied and field research. On the other hand, pragmatic semiotic researchers are only a few to be involved in this adventure.

For this lecture and debate, we shall try to study the gap between the activity theory frameworks and the research on the field. We hope to be able to put in the light how it is hard to conceptualise and we’ll try to show how and why the pragmatic semiotic does not find its own way to propose a direct application in the field of design.

We’ll present some of our apparatus in applied semiotic and we’ll try to present our attempts to conceptualise our research.