2:12 Being-There: How to Semiotically Consider What Will Attract Your Audience + Book Review
Semiosis 101 Season 2, Video 12 Transcript
Hello readers.
In this free transcript for the video published on Semiosis 101 on 19 July 2023, we will be focusing on aspects of Experience Design by reviewing two books, to help you to phenomenologically explore audience lived experience.
Watch the free video on YouTube for the full impact…
…and here is the video’s transcript.
NOTE: As with any video transcript the tone used is conversational. The following transcript text features ad libs, and therefore should be read in the spirit of any semi-scripted video.
The two books I will be reviewing are. Charles S. Peirce’s Philosophy of Signs: Essays in Comparative Semiotics by Gérard Deledalle, and Design for Dasein: Understanding the Design of Experiences.
Deledalle is a respected Peircean academic who writes about Peirce’s theory so that non-academics can understand. This book is a collection of Deledalle’s essays, and as before, the index will be a creative’s friend.
I first heard Thomas Wendt present Design for Dasein at Interaction 14 conference in Amstersdam in 2014. This was a 20-30 minute talk, after which I introduced myself. I myself was at Interaction 14 to run my first PhD methodology workshop with delegates. I was trialling the first iteration of my method cards that synthesised Peirce’s Semiosis within a Hermeneutic Phenomenological framework (from Heidegger) to visually explore audience experiences.
At this workshop, I had prepared sets of method cards, and with about 30 international design delegates we spent the morning going step-by-step through a visualising method I called a VPM. (A Visual Phenomenological Methodology).
Okay, I am not going to spend any more time on this. If you want to know more then check out some of my academic papers on the academia.edu link below, or my actual PhD. Now back to Wendt.
I have the memory of the main auditorium fairly full, but only about six of us who really got what Wendt was saying about Dasein and designing. In a similar way, in my workshop the day before, I had spent most of the workshop in great discussions with delegates about Peirce’s theory.
Without Interaction 14 Semiosis 101 would probably not exist!
But before we go any further into Dasein, we will begin with a review of Deledalle’s book of essays on Peirce. This book is a very useful reader into Peirce’s thinking on semiotics. Deledalle’s essays stretch over 50 years of his erudition. Out of all his essay’s I found the first three parts of his book the most rewarding, especially part two’s essays:
Sign: Semiosis and Representamen
Sign: The Concept and Its Use
Deladalle is a respected Peircean. It was essentially from him that I began to use “REPRESENTATION” from a Visual Communication Design context as a suitable designer-centric term for Peirce’s Representamen. At the bottom of the first page of his Semiosis and Representamen essay, Deladelle makes a statement about Peirce and Representation, which appears to run counter to how I use the term.
Deladelle states that, “Peirce himself explicitly makes the distinction in the context of representation where ’sign’ is given as a synonym of ‘representation’ defined as ’semiosis’ and opposed to ‘representamen’ (p37).
The first thing here is to say let us not get side-tracked into a semantics argument over ‘representation’. As Semiosis 101’s remit is to put Peirce into designer-centric language for the 21st century, we have in previous videos already dealt with problems with words meaning different (and even conflicting) things. (Icon/Iconic and Symbol are the two obvious words here). Peirce uses ‘sign’ for both sign-action (Semiosis) and sign-object (Representamen). Therefore Peirce uses ‘representation’ as a synonym FOR the semiotic action of a sign. Whereas, I use Representation as an analogue for representing the Concept (Peirce’s sign-object). Same word, different uses? In the next two videos I will explore the semiotic representation in Visual Communication more fully.
Deladelle’s essays in this book offer the lay-philosopher (i.e. us) a clarity on Peirce’s terminology. He uses a phrase in the same essay as previously mentioned that is very useful for those of you trying to grasp Semiosis to apply it. On page 49 Deladelle writes, “Semiosis is a temporal process. It unites three universes of possibility, existence, and discourse.” Sign-action is built on the inter-relationship of threes. Across time.
Encoded semiotic meaning can lie dormant in a design or illustration until the audience perceives the Representation for someTHING. Then Semiosis begins.It is in this phenomenological state of Peirce’s Firstness where this happens in the audience, for them to begin interpreting embedded meaning. This segues nicely into the second book review.
The second book in this review has already been cited in recent videos.
Thomas Wendt’s Design for Dasein: Understanding the Design of Experience approaches the design of experience from a Hermeneutic phenomenological perspective.
Yes, I know… more philosophical terminology.
Let us use the more alluringly immediate term “Being-There” instead which situates the senses of people firmly as important to knowledge. Being-There is essentially the translation of Heidegger’s German word Dasein. So Wendt in this book is arguing for creatives to design for people’s situated needs, to aid the audience to make sense of what they see/interact with/use more fully.
Designing for the target audience’s situated needs helps to align the client’s own needs more successfully. So, I am myself arguing here that Semiosis offers designers and illustrators an effective visual communication structure to do just that.
With this alignment of Semiosis and Being-There, a synthesis of theoretical thinking helps the designer or illustrator to make stronger communicational connections with target audiences through visual semiotics. Although Wendt is a Heideggerian rather than a Peircean, he does quote Peirce and his phenomenology to make his Being-There arguments.
The first four chapters of the book are very useful in synthesising Being-There and Experience Design with Semiosis. (Later chapters are good, but are concerned on specific applications in technology, products, etc.) Wendt refers to Peirce on a particular form of reasoning that is pertinent to creative thinking - abductive reasoning or abduction.
Once more we see the the problem of Peirce’s choice of terms.
Abduction is an unfortunate term to decide upon, which immediately denotes something criminal more than a form of reasoning. But we will work around that. There are three forms of reasoning.
• Deductive = formal logic
• Inductive = logic of science
• Abductive = logic of hypothesis
On p63 Wendt quotes Peirce, “The abductive suggestion comes to us like a flash. It is an act of insight, although extremely fallible insight. (…) It is the idea of putting together what we have never before dreamed of putting together which flashes the new suggestion before our contemplation” (CP V: 181).
In chapter 3 Wendt describes design thinking as abductive. He leads with, “Design is a Daseinerly process, and Dasein is a designerly process” (p49). He later builds on Nigel Cross’ statement that “Abduction is the logic of design” (p63) to build his case.He frames the creative’s ideation phase as when abductive thinking is prominent, as ideation,“Attempts to mediate abductive thinking about what could be with what is feasible and what is desirable” (p68).
What these two books offers the visual communicator, trying to apply Semiosis to enhance how they visually communicate with their target audience, [are] two important things. Wendt offers us a fresh way of reframing what creatives do to build an experience with the target audience, in order to hook and retain their attention and time to interpret. Deladelle offers us a more concise way to apply Peirce’s semiotic theory. Between these two authors it makes a synthesis of Semiosis into Visual Communication Design more achievable, if we consider the needs of the target audience we are visually communicating to.
When we create visual communication, Wendt offers us up three Being-There questions to consider:
• What could be?
• What is feasible?
• What is desirable?
We just now need to put these questions in the context of a target audience.
To end this twelfth season two video, we can conclude that a reframing of visually communicating within a phenomenological context, will situate the target audience “Being-There” (Dasein). Essentially using their state of existing-in-the-world as inspiration for our creative ideation. What do I mean?
Okay, let us return to the questions to power the semiotic sign-action from the Iconic level upwards. To Represent and visually communicate a client’s Concept what could be the resemblances and qualities that will hook attention? What visual language is feasible to do this? What is aesthetic choices are desirable to hook and maintain attention?
Peirce’s “logic of design” as Cross calls abductive reasoning, provides creatives with HYPOTHESIS.
Come back next week and we will begin to explore how semiotic hypothesis (or most appropriate solution) helps you to succeed.
Watch the free video on YouTube for the full impact…