Medical-Based Pictogram: Comprehension of Visual Language with Semiotic Theory

摘要

In this increasingly technical world, pictograms have become a significant part of our daily lives through their use in public areas, such as public transit system, warning signs and pharmaceutical pictograms. Compared with icons, which are simple, concrete, and self-explanatory of the text or meaning they represent, pictograms seems to be more abstract, they use analogy or symbolic representation for conveying messages (Michael 2013). However, it turns out that not all pictograms could reach this goal, understanding could vary between different groups of people (Mara 2018), many pictograms are not understood as intended. The interpretation of medical-based pictograms could result in violation of medical advice, and symptoms can range from gain less treatment benefit to get ill. Despite the function of communication is significant in pictograms, there is few principles to guide and suggest pictograms design. This research aims to use the theory of semiotic to disassemble the meaning of pictograms into three parts: Semantics, Syntactics and Pragmatics, these three branches of semiotic include the interpretation in different angles, and each construction of signs in the pictogram would influence perception of interpretation, it turns out that misunderstanding of visual messages in pictograms has multiple causes, and proved that semiotic theory could developed to interpret visual messages. This study may help to further elucidate the visual grammar of medical-based pictograms that are universally understood and reduce the risk of ambiguous medicine labels and instruction.