| This thesis discusses the multifaceted nature of Human-Computer Interaction through dimensions associated with disciplines in the sciences and engineering (information technology), the social sciences (people and society), and the arts and humanities (interaction and communication), and proposes a three-dimensional conceptual framework. The proposed framework is a three dimensional conceptual chart in which disciplinary relations can be visualized and explored. It is used to chart the historical disciplinary boundaries of both informatics and HCI and their expansive or retractive tendencies, showing a chasm between Informatics' and HCI's theories and their actual footprints. This chasm is a motivation for an in-depth exploration of a small part of Peirce's work, the foundations of Semiotics.; The thesis structure includes topics across several disciplines, shifting from an exploration of the narrowing tendencies of Informatics (mostly product driven), passing through the broadening goals of HCI and Software Engineering (mostly human and management driven, respectively), and finally reaching the foundations of Peirce's Semiotics (necessarily ethically and esthetically driven).; Abstract relations are fundamental to a deeper understanding of Peirce's work, including semiotics. However, consensus on Peircean sign relations has been achieved neither in semiotics nor in its applications to informatics, being often in contradiction to it. In order to establish solid foundation between HCI and Semiotics, this thesis concludes with a systematization of the structure of Peirce's sign relations with the aid of tools developed in Informatics, stressing their relational and open characteristics. In particular, it discusses sign relations and derived categories as mathematical lattices. Multi-dimensional Hasse diagrams are introduced and used to structure and visualize both sign relations and relations among their categories. Existing diagrams are shown as particular cases of the proposed solution, illustrating its expressiveness. |
