Abstract
Human beings find a variety of meanings from a sensory stimulus provided by artifacts. Found meanings may differ depending on interpreter's knowledge and context. For example, a vehicle engine sound means powerful accelerations for a driver, but annoying noise for neighborhoods. Each meaning creates different value. Our motivation in this study is to provide designers the exhaustive possible meanings of a sensory stimulus in early stage of design. Potential meanings stimulate desingers to come up with design strategies with novel points of view. Exhaustive meanings help designers to avoid interferences between different meanings with respect to their values. In case of electric vehicle, for example, the silence of vehicle cruise sound is attractive for neightborhood, but it put walkers at risk due to increasing difficulty to notice approaching vehicle. The goal of our study was to construct a new design framework for structuring semantics of artifacts' sensory information using idea of Peirce's semiotics, and exhaustive categories of meanings. With the framework, we developed a methodology for semantic deployments of a sensory information. We further proposed the outlook of design support tool of sensory information based on proposed methodology.
