Pedagogical Interaction Product
Overview: Semiotics is one of the most important and often most overlooked aspects of design, it’s briefly introduced to designers while on school but often it left aside and forgotten after a while, the reason being that Semiotics is a complex topic to understand and apply for design students.
The Goal
To design a method and a tool that could support students better understand semiotics and develop a consistent use of it on their design practice.
In simple terms Semiotics main focus is the understanding of everything that can be taken as a sign in our material culture such as building, furniture and products, and how this signs generate a connection with people. When used right Semiotics help shape design concepts that are meaningful to people.
When attributes and values are aligned correctly and well represented on a design, this translates into an emotion in the user and them giving meaning to objects.
Learning Science topics integrated on the learning process
-Self efficacy-Tool should help students feel confident in themselves when learning a complicated topic like this.
-Retrieval-Students must be able to go back and get back information they’ve learned quickly to reinforce their understanding of the topic.
Key Insight
Students should be able to quickly understand the relation between values, attributes and emotions and apply it into their design projects to create meaningful concepts.
Ideation
Rolly is a learning and design tool that supports students in understanding semiotics and how to apply it to their design work by making the process of translating values into tangible attributes that evoke emotions and create meaning on the user.
Rolly works with a codex that helps students understand how a combination of values, emotions and attributes translate into a certain message and provides them with suggestions and reference of design that can help them build their own visual language.
To use Rolly students simply have to make combinations by turning around the different discs and aligning values, attributes and emotions to the arrow on the main body and click the button on the top which generates a number code for that combination. Students can then use this number to search on the Rolly codex a description of what meaning such combination would generate on the user as well as examples of design.
CONCLUSION
The best way to learn something is by constant practice, Rolly enables students to get comfortable with semiotics so they can develop the habit of using it on their design process. By having a tool that can support the use of semiotics the learning process becomes something more dynamic and that is done by using semiotics the right way.