The Semiotics of Movement in Space: A User’s Perspective

The Semiotics of Movement and Space explores how people move through buildings and interact with objects in space. Focusing on visitors to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, McMurtrie analyzes and interprets movement and space relations to highlight new developments and applications of spatial semiotics, as he proposes that people’s movement options have the potential to transform the meaning of a particular space. He illustrates people’s interaction with micro-camera footage of people’s movements through the museum from a first-person point-of-view, thereby providing an alternative, complementary perspective on how buildings are actually used. The book offers effective tools for practitioners to analyze people’s actual and potential movement patterns to rethink spatial design options from a semiotic perspective. The applicability of the semiotic principles developed in this book is demonstrated by examining movement options in a range of other types of buildings (such as foyers, apartments, classrooms). This book also shows how a semiotic approach to understanding movement in space can be applied in a pedagogical context by exploring how undergraduate students of architecture and design are currently applying the theoretical framework and concepts to their 3-d design projects (railways, student lounges, houses). This book should appeal to scholars of visual communication, semiotics, multimodal discourse analysis and museum studies.