Os principais temas de pesquisa investigados com alunos de mestrado e doutorado, em projetos que contam também com a participação de colaboradores brasileiros e estrangeiros são os seguintes:

• teorias de IHC; métodos de avaliação de IHC; modelos conceituais de design da metacomunicação em sistemas interativos; linguagens de representação e programação para usuários avançados e desenvolvedores leigos; aspectos culturais de IHC; acessibilidade.

              
About this book's cover ...

What is Semiotic Engineering?

Semiotic Engineering was originally proposed as a semiotic approach to designing user interface languages. Over the years, with research done at the Department of Informatics of the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, it evolved into a semiotic theory of human-computer interaction. It views HCI as computer-mediated communication between designers and users at interaction time. The system speaks for its designers in various types of conversations specified at design time. These conversations communicate the designers' understanding of who the users are, what they know the users want or need to do, in which preferred ways, and why. The designers' message to users includes even the interactive language in which users will have to communicate back with the system in order to achieve their specific goals. So, the process is in fact one of communication about communication, or metacommunication.