The Semantics of Artefacts. How We Give Meaning to the Things We Produce and Use Autor: Martin Siefkes [erschienen in: Bildtheoretische Ansätze in der Semiotik (Themenheft zu IMAGE 16)] Schlagwörter: Artefakt, materielle Kultur, Semantik, Design, Stil, Ikonizität (artefacts, material culture, semantics, design, style, iconicity) Disziplinen: Designforschung, kognitive Psychologie, Semiotik (design studies, cognitive psychology, semiotics) Broadly defined, every result of a human action is an artefact. In a narrower sense, the term is used for material things resulting from human actions; in this sense, all artefacts together form the realm of material culture. Although meanings play an important role in our daily interaction with artefacts, they have never been treated in a comprehensive and systematic fashion. In design theory, cultural semiotics, anthropology, and archaeology, different approaches to the semantics of artefacts have been taken. The article draws on these findings to build a generalized approach to artefact semantics that concentrates on the processes in which artefacts are connected with meanings (cf. section 3). [Artikeltext] |