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 (HCI).
[3][4] Semiotic Engineering views HCI as computer-mediated communication between designers and users at interaction time.
In the 2009 book Semiotic Engineering Methods for Scientific Research in HCI, Clarisse de Souza and Carla Leitão discuss how SIM and CEM, which are both qualitative methods, can also be used in scientific contexts to generate new knowledge about HCI.
[5] To illustrate their points, the authors present an extensive case study with a free open-source digital audio editor called Audacity.
The authors were introduced to each other (and to each other's version of 'semiotic engineering') only in 1996, in a Dagstuhl Seminar on Informatics and Semiotics organized by Peter B. Andersen, Mihai Nadin and Frieder Nake.