1st Edition

The Semiotics of Movement in Space

By Robert James McMurtrie Copyright 2017
    292 Pages 19 Color & 41 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    292 Pages 19 Color & 41 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    284 Pages 19 Color & 41 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    The Semiotics of Movement in 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 analyses 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 microcamera footage of people’s movement 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 analyse 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 restaurant and a café, with the hope that the principles can be developed and applied to other sites of displays such as shopping centres and transportation hubs. This book should appeal to scholars of visual communication, semiotics, multimodal discourse analysis and visitor studies. 

    1. Paving the Way: Theories, terms and texts

    2. Modelling Movement in Space as a Semogenic System: The discourse-semantic and expression strata

    3. Modelling Movement in Space as a Semogenic System: The hodogrammatical stratum

    4. Framing and Reframing Exhibition Space: Viewing stations, isoglosses and facial orientation

    5. Points of Departure and Connection: Theme, spatiotaxis and intersemiotic connection

    6. Transforming Space into Place: Rhythm and occupation value

    7. Interacting in Exhibition Space: (Dis)aligning with the semiotic designer

    8. Negotiation the Authorial Voice: Spatial engagement and graduation

    9. Repressing and Experiencing Perceptual Structures: Assigning participatory rules

    10. Exploratory Exhibition SpaceS: A child’s perspective

    11. Movement in Restaurants and Cafés: Sites of performance and display

    12. Retracing our Steps and Moving Forward

    Biography

    Robert James McMurtrie is a PhD from the University of New South Wales, Australia, in Multimodality and Spatiogrammatics.