Attending to the technical dimension of artifacts, for example, by applied scientists, mechanical or electronic engineers, and experts in economics, production, and marketing, is called technology-centered design.

Attending to the meanings that users bring to their artifacts, how they use them and talk about them and among various stakeholders, is the domain of human-centered design.

Human-computer interfaces consist of interactively rearrangeable icons, texts, and controls that users can understand in everyday terms and manipulate towards desirable ends.

The design of intelligent artifacts suggests that the old adage of “form follows function” is no longer valid[1] – except for the simplest of tools.

The semantic turn suggests that human-centered designers’ unique expertise resides in the design of human interfaces with artifacts that are meaningful, easy to use, even enjoyable to experience, be it simple kitchen implements, public service systems, architectural spaces, or information campaigns.

The Semantic Turn represents an evolution from "Product Semantics" by Krippendorff and Butter,[3] which was defined as "A systematic inquiry into how people attribute meanings to artifacts and interact with them accordingly" and "a vocabulary and methodology for designing artifacts in view of the meanings they could acquire for their users and the communities of their stakeholders".

Krippendorff refers to the Italian philosopher G. Vico for opposing R. Descartes by claiming we humans know what we have constructed, made up, cognitively, materially, or socially,[8] to the biologists J. Uexküll for his species-specific theory of meaning[9] and H. Maturana and F. Varela for developing a biological foundation of cognition,[10] to the psychologist J. J. Gibson for his conception of affordance, which acknowledges that our environment does not account for our perception, it merely affords our sensory-motor coordinations[11] or it does not; and to the anthropological linguist B. L. Whorf for his recognition that our perceptions are correlated with language, its grammar and vocabulary.

Exploration is facilitated by informatives such as state indicators, progress reports, confirmations of actions and readiness, alarm signals, close correlations between actions and their expected effects, maps of possibilities, instructions, error messages, and multi-sensory feedback.

Users' intrinsic motivation arises from reliance, the seemingly effortless, unproblematic yet skillful engagement with artifacts free of disruptions.

A well designed interface enables unambiguous recognition, effective exploration, and leads to enjoyable reliance.

To accomplish these transitions, human-centered designers need to involve second-order understanding of users' cognitive models, cultural habits, and competencies.

Krippendorff proposes that artifacts should be designed so that their interfaces are [easily] narratable[19] and fit into social or communicational relationships.

Designers need to analyse them for, as Krippendorff asserts, " The meanings that artifacts acquire in use are largely framed in language".

[21] Dictionaries tend to define ecology as multi-species interaction in a common environment, the species being animals and plants.

People arrange artifacts, like the furniture at home; connect them into networks, like computes in the internet; form large cultural cooperatives, like hospitals full of medical equipment, drugs, and treatments; retire one species in favor of another, like typewriters gave way to personal computers; or change their ecological meanings, like horses, originally used for work and transportation, found an ecological niche in sports.

In an ecology of artifacts, the meaning of one consists of the possible interactions with other artifacts: cooperation, competition (substitution), domination or submission, leading technological development, like computers do right now, supporting the leaders, like the gadgets found in computer stores.

Similarly, roads and gas stations follow the development of automobiles and participate in a very large cultural complex, including the design of cities and the distribution of work, and affect nature through depletion of resources, creating waste and CO2 emissions.

The science for design, always concerned with not yet observable contingencies, cannot provide the simple truth claims of the kind that natural scientist aspire to for their theories.

But it can provide several other human-centered ways to back the claims designers need to make: Since its coinage in 1984,[29] the use of “product semantics” has mushroomed.