I’m in an informal reading group with some of the gang from complex systems, cog sci, and linguistics. One of the papers we’re reading for today really illuminated – in an HCI/d way – the talk Jeff was giving yesterday about the shared collective space of intention, meaning, and understanding. Since I know Dewey and Turner, et al, can seem a bit flimsy to some students with a more technical background, I thought the opening page of this paper made a great concrete example of how the complex emergence of meaning impacts our future technical designs.

Here is a link to google scholar (you still have to click the top link “Semiotic dynamics for embodied agents” by L. Steele to get the PDF): http://tinyurl.com/yqv2ov

To make this relate directly to our discussion yesterday, you might just consider semiotics as “words”, dynamics as “interactions”, and embodied agents as “people.” If you’re intrigued, move on to the later pages where you’ll see how the modern research in artificial intelligence (2006), very much mirrors the modern perspective on HCI/d that Indiana U teaches. This technical research in this paper clearly suggests that artificial intelligence specialists need to look at language acquisition and understanding as an emergent property of social context and shared interactions.

Just like Dewey.
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