2017: Design For Next Conference, European Academy of Design, Sapienza University, Rome, Italy (original) (raw)
Related papers
2017: A Semiotic Rosetta Stone: Developing a Designer-centric Meta-language of Pragmatic Semiotics
The Design Journal, 2017
In this paper I outline the development of a designer-centric metalanguage that interfaces between practitioner and theoretician, without compromising their integrity and rigour. I express this through a Rosetta Stone metaphor and how, as a design researcher, I developed this concept when I had to pierce through Peirce's pragmatic semiotic theory to enhance aesthetic practice. I initially found it a challenge to understand Peirce's unfamiliar academic terminology without any prior formal education in Pragmatism or semiotic theory. The problem for designers is that theoretical language can be intimidating, arcane and opaque. In reviewing the Peircean literature I identified an absence of designer-centric literature, which would quickly facilitate designers' understanding of Semiosis. This paper therefore is a progressive call for more concerted collaboration between theoreticians and practitioners. This would ideally lead to new designer-centric Peircean literature being published, leading to the enhancement of aesthetic creative practice.
Graphic Design Educators’ Network Conference, Cardiff Metropolitan University, UK., 2016
There is a fine tradition of graphic designers making the transition from design practice to design education, and Bauhaus’ Moholy-Nagy provides a good historic precedence for this. But within Higher Education there is now an expectation to also engage in ‘academic research,’ but surely that is what social scientist or humanities scholars do? After all, graphic designers understand praxis and tacit knowledge? As the discipline’s educators, how do we develop the field of graphic design research “from anecdote to evidence” to develop the field of academic research. This paper suggests that a philosophical application of Pragmatism within our practice would be beneficial. Moholy-Nagy, back in 1950’s Chicago embraced pragmatic methodologies in his New Bauhaus School. With Pragmatism’s focus on knowledge and understanding being emergent, this paper will outline a practice-based, pragmatic methodological framework, which utilises C.S. Peirce’s pragmatic form of semiotics - Semiosis. This paper will use visual examples to take the reader into this design research, which is both THROUGH and FOR design, to demonstrate one possible way to facilitate the improvement of our visual communication.
2019: Little Designer in Theoryland: A Designer-centric Approach to Understanding Theory
International Association of Societies of Design Research Conference 2019 , 2019
This paper sets out the argument for a more proactive design thinking dialogue between designers and theoreticians, to improve the interface between theory and designers' tacit creative practice. To illustrate this problem, it will focus on Peirce's pragmatic semiotic theory of Semiosis, and how designers and Peircean semioticians are beginning to address the barriers around complex theoretical language. The metaphor of a Semiotic Rosetta Stone will be used to demonstrate the central argument for a development of more designer-centric dissemination of theory. Its argument will be supported by historical precedent of the use of a metalanguage to bridge between the known and unknown. Such a designer-centric metalanguage would refocus complex theory without 'dumbing down,' and help designers who are unschooled in theory to implement it more easily into their design practice, to enhance the effectiveness of visual communication design. An emerging international Semiotic Rosetta Stone network of designers and Peircean semioticians will be explored, and its roots will be mapped to the ground work of others. Outreach work with designers from 2018-19 will be discussed, especially the use of qualitative tools (such as a semiotic probe) to begin mapping designers' tacit language to Peircean terms. The paper will then conclude with a call for more designers and theoreticians to further collaborate to build models on how theory can be applied to design practice. This would afford more freedom of movement within each other's disciplinary territories of Designland and Theoryland.
Darras, B. (2011) Design and Pragmatic Semiotics
2011
This article aims to demonstrate the relation- ship between design and semiotics. The author of the present paper – a semiotician working in the field of design theory and practice – demonstrates how pragmatic semiotics can be useful to designers in the course of their training as well as later on when studying the processes of design, creation and development in a professional context. He also presents the main themes in the field of pragmatic epistemology and its impact on semiotics of experience. Finally, by way of a practical study, he outlines his concept of semiotic studies of design.
2014
As a starting point some considerations from Peircean thinking will be presented. The Peircean sign conception will be outlined as looked upon from a design point of view. Thus, e.g. the index brings an actual connection into the human experience and the interpretation of things, which is too little dealt with. Other modes of signs refer to other contents and signify respectively. Peirce’s semiotics does not split the inner and outer into separate domains, but conceives them in mutual interaction. Furthermore, one may ask what feelings a design product awakens. The article concludes by outlining a work in progress, which will approach care homes for elderly people by means of Peircean semiotics.
2015
Designers are among those professionals who have shown a first and continued interest in the modern revival of semiotics. In search of a theory for a field of human practice characterized by a lack of conceptual discipline, designers, especially those formed in the Ulm School tradition, were willing to adopt semiotics as their theory, provided that semioticians pay attention to critical problems of design and not extend a logocratic model where something else seemed necessary. Maldonado (1967) undoubtedly deserves credit for being receptive to semiotics and making it part of his own design concept. At Theo Crosby's initiative, and with the assistance of some of his students (Guy Bonsiepe deserves mention here), he published several articles dealing with semiotic concepts and their pertinence to design. This happened when Europe discovered Charles S. Peirce; when Bense, continuing his search for a scientific foundation of aesthetics, arrived at sign theory (1970, 1971), and when ...
Designing Peirce: the idea of design in Charles S. Peirce semiotics
The underlying hypothesis that guides our research holds that Charles S. Peirce's semiotic program discloses a theory of design. More precisely: that the idea of design is the tacit paradigm that articulates and guides both Peirce's pragmatism and the theories that, within Peirce, are the context and frame of his pragmatic standing: phenomenology, semiotics and metaphysics. The first move was to approach the idea of design, abstracted from its specific problems, methods and applications. This approach to design was based on an empirical and common-sense stand point, in order to find its necessary conditions, its founding problems and, especially, its qualifying marks: the modality of the future, the category of possibility and the discourse of anticipation. The second move was to verify if these conditions, problems and marks were also the fulcrum of Peirce's pragmatism. They were indeed. The third and last move comes from this drift between Peirce's ideas and the id...