In view of the pervasive role played by Information Technology in contemporary life, a growing community of researchers, practitioners, and educators has been involved with human-centered computing (HCC), a field of studies concerned with the integration of theories and methodologies to support the combined investigation of machines, humans, and domains of applications. Comprehensive HCC studies should then articulate technical, personal, social, and cultural factors, addressing the use of technology, its design, and development.
This introductory chapter provides an overview of our incremental contribution to advance HCC studies, a suite of tools called SigniFYI. With this tool, we aim to uncover meanings inscribed in software, their origins, and consequences. We propose to identify and trace instances of consistently related objects across different segments of investigation concerning software production and use. In order to achieve this goal, we rely on semiotic engineering theory, which provides us with conceptual and methodological resources with which to obtain a coherent perspective across multiple segments of investigation. The result is a principled account of relations between the objects in each segment.
Following Schön’s perspectives on reflective practice applied to software design and development, SigniFYI stimulates researchers, professionals, and educators to think critically about what they do and how they do it and with which means and for which ends. Additionally, in research contexts, SigniFYI supports the validation of knowledge produced with interpretive research methods.
In this chapter, we present a piece of technical fiction, that is, a short story that tells how a group of users trying to coordinate action through Web and mobile applications got into serious problems. The aim of the story is to serve as a motivation and an illustration of our proposed approach to human-centered computing (HCC).
In spite of being a piece of fiction, our “software development story” is composed by episodes verified in use situations by one or more of the authors. Hence, the portrayed scenario is a realistic one. It provides a quick illustration of SigniFYI, the suite of tools to inspect meanings encoded in software design, which we introduce in Chap. 1 and will develop and discuss in Chapters 3 and 4.
In this chapter, we present a detailed description of the SigniFYI suite, extending the overview presented in the introductory chapter. SigniFYI consists of a set of conceptual, methodological, and technical tools that aim to support the study of meaning-making and meaning-taking processes in software design, development and use. In this chapter, we describe and illustrate each SigniFYI component in a separate section, and all sections refer to the “software development story” presented in Chap. 2 as a common background scenario.
Firstly, we present SigniFYIng Message, a conceptual tool that provides ontological and epistemological support for the remaining components of the suite. Next, we discuss the suite’s methodological tools: SigniFYIng Interaction, SigniFYIng Models, and SigniFYIng APIs. These components allow the inspection of a variety of software artifacts in order to investigate how meanings are inscribed in software and how they can propagate, from the early stages of development to final end-use situations. Among these artifacts, we have interactive visual interfaces, modeling tools and models produced while using these tools, and reusable programming packages and their interfaces (APIs). Finally, we detail SigniFYIng Traces, a conceptual blueprint for a technical tool using capture and access (C&A) technology to document the details of interpretive processes and evidence used in them. In addition, we discuss the role of SigniFYIng Traces in the support and integration of the suite’s methodological components, which makes SigniFYI a knowledge-building tool for supporting reflection and learning.
In this chapter, we present our concluding remarks about SigniFYI and other topics discussed in the previous chapters. We begin by recalling the origins of human-centered computing and the contribution of pioneer researchers to its evolution. We also contrast the different conceptual views of HCC, considered by some researchers as a field on its own, while others see it as a new perspective on existing fields of study.
Next, we make some considerations about the epistemology of practice, from Schön’s perspectives to more recent work from contemporary researchers. We analyze their relationship with Peirce’s semiotic theory, semiotic engineering, SigniFYI, and reflective practice in research, professional, and educational contexts. The chapter ends with arguments in favor of the potential of SigniFYI to address HCC challenges, at least those challenges that can be framed as human metacommunication mediated by software artifacts. We also identify limitations of SigniFYI due to its commitment to a particular theory and line of reasoning and propose future work to confirm and expand the contribution of our current work in an attempt to invite and stimulate interested readers.
