The Semiotics of Movement in Space

Book excerpt: 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.