Free Transcript of Episode 2.20 BREAKING THE SEMIOTIC CODE! A Creative Breakthrough at Last
Semiosis 101 Season 2, Video 20 Transcript
Hello readers.
In this free transcript for the video published on Semiosis 101 on 27 Sep 2023, in this final season two video we review this season’s videos to demonstrate what we have discovered about Semiosis so far. The theme has been the Semiotic Rosetta Stone metaphor, a call for designer-centric explanation of Peirce’s Pragmatic semiotic theory of sign-action.
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.
Welcome to Semiosis 101 twentieth semiotic video and the final episode of season two. Season three will be previewed next week.
If you have watched Semiosis 101 videos before then you will already know I am Dave Wood.
Season two’s semiotic theme has been a Semiotic Rosetta Stone, a metaphor to the unlocking and designer-centric translation of Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotic theory of Semiosis - sign-action.
Why do you need Semiosis 101?
Peirce’s writing and terminology is very …obtuse.
In this final season two video I will review this season’s videos to demonstrate what we have discovered about Semiosis so far. The theme has been the Semiotic Rosetta Stone metaphor, a call for designer-centric explanation of Peirce’s Pragmatic semiotic theory of sign-action. This has led us down some interesting paths.
Hit subscribe and I will review these…
This Semiosis 101 season’s first five episodes helped to orientate you all to what semiotics is …and is not.
The next three episodes then addressed the reason to apply semiotic theory away from the creative to the target audience. I began to orientate you all to a phenomenological viewpoint on this, and introduced the concept of audience life-worlds to help.
To help further focus you all on applying semiotics to semiotically ‘hook’ and retain the attention of your target audience, I introduced a Pragmatic view of aesthetics.
This opened the conversation up in the next three videos to existential ways of understanding your target audience, and a logic of design tool to process that understanding into useful semiotic clues.
Then we spent three episodes unpacking how to use that abductive reasoning to build audience hypotheses.
At each point in season two I introduced new philosophical ideas I reviewed a range of books on semiotics and design.
These book reviews were of books that helped my own processing and application of Peirce’s semiotic theory.
By reviewing these books I intend them to help designers and illustrators to expand your own conceptual understanding of how to apply Semiosis too.
These books were mostly paired titles around the episode theme for discussion each month, after the first review of five semiotic important books. I tried to provide in each pairing a useful academic semiotic theory book, plus either a complementary design or philosophy book.
The last of these book reviews opened up the discussion of applying Semiosis across vast expanse of human development, from present day practice right back in time to our hunter-gatherer ancestors.
So to review what season two has contributed to a designer-centric understanding of how to: firstly,; make sense of Charles Sanders Peirce’s obtuse but brilliant semiotic theory in 21st century design and illustration creative practice; and secondly, to centre the target audience in that creative practice.
After all, it is the target audience we are visually communicating with, and the client’s task will only be successful if the creative can ‘hook’ and retain their attention away from the overload of visual noise that surrounds that audience every second of their lived experiences.
I have taken a thematic step through the visual AND theoretical noise this season. The Semiotic Rosetta Stone metaphor is crucial here. To creatives, Peirce’s excellent theory may as well be written in hieroglyphics, as it is overly complicated and obtusely written.
In FireSigns, Steven Skaggs excellent 2017 book, he set out to centre Peirce as A Semiotic Theory for Graphic Design.
My visual communication PhD had been published in 2016 by University of Edinburgh, so this valuable book was too late to influence my own application of Peirce into Visual Communication Design practice. While we diverge on ways to apply Peirce, we do converge on the importance of his theory on our creativity.
It was of interest to see how, probably simultaneously at the time of writing our manuscripts, we attempted to put Peirce’s ten classifications of a semiotic sign into contemporary creative contexts.
(See season one videos 1.7 and 1.8 for a quick overview of these ten sign classifications - I will return to these probably in season five episodes late next year).
Soon Semiosis 101 season three will begin, so I will expand on the convergences with Skaggs’ FireSigns in more depth then. What is crucial here is that I am not the sole voice advocating Peirce’s Semiosis to help enhance how you visually communicate.
Paired with Skaggs’ book I reviewed Genevieve von Petzinger’s book The First Signs too.
In last week’s episode I took you all back at least 1600 human generations. I did this so you can not only appreciate how semiotic sign-action (with its implicit abductive reasoning logic), be used to decode semiotic meaning as a tertiary audience, but also to understand that as humans we tend to visually encode meaning. We are almost hard-wired.
The First Signs tantalisingly provides this evidence.
As this season has emphasised, Semiosis 101 only concerns ourselves with the target audience.
I would highlight three main important season two ways to frame how you design or illustrate.
Three semiotic hacks to enhance your visual communication skills to attract, connect with, and retain your target audience’s attention and focus.
These three fresh ways to rethink how illustrators and designers do what you already creatively do during your ideation phase, unapologetically brings in philosophical lenses to consider adopting.
Peirce’s Semiosis is firmly philosophically rooted in a phenomenological world.
Peirce’s chosen logic on which his approach follows has also been described as the ‘logic of design.’ This is abductive reasoning from which a working hypothesis can be made to begin to understand your target audience …any target audience.
Both of these open up the creative to then explore the existential lived experiences - the life-worlds - of your target audiences.
Peirce’s Semiosis is built on triadic structures, where three aspects interact with each other during the semiotic sign-action.
These phenomenological states are Firstness, Secondness and yes, Thirdness. (Check out season one episodes 1.15 to 1.18 to get a grounding in these states).
In four season two episodes (2.9, 2.12, 2.15 and 2.16) we explored these states and began to contextualise them into what do they mean for creative practice. We did this in the context of the aesthetic decisions creative’s take, and how this aesthetic can be crafted semiotically to enhance the attention of the audience. We saw this as a way to semiotically strengthen the calls to action the visual communication suggests, whether this is a page turn, or a change in outlook …or, yes, even to convince them to buy more beans!
This season I presented examples of how you as creatives can get better at abduction.
No, not kidnapping …logical abduction or abductive reasoning if your prefer.
Stop cutting letters out of newspapers, there was no ransom demands.
Abductive reasoning has been called the logic of design. Unlike deductive reasoning that seeks a truth or inductive reasoning, where scientific proofs are sort, this logic looks for the best solution in the here and now. A working hypothesis that can be reviewed and updated as more is known, but a logic that helps creatives to begin ideation.
In episodes 2.12 - 2.19 we examined many different ways to use a working hypothesis to understand the target audience and to use their lived experiences to gain insights to begin encoding with Iconic representation. We hacked an audience persona tool, remember?
Speaking of audience’s lived experiences, in episode 2.8 I introduced the phenomenological lens of a “lifeworld,” a philosophical framework in which audience lived experiences can be understood.
This season I introduced a new existential term to the exploration of applying Semiosis - Dasein (see episodes 2.6, 2.8, 2.9, 2.12, 2.13, 2.15). Dasein is a German word that the philosopher Martin Heidegger used to understand how we exist in-the-world and how meaning is constructed from experience.
The English translation is …Being-There.
This was introduced to help creatives to learn from the experience design discipline, and to prep you all for considering the audience not as passive consumers, but as active interpreters.
Semiosis …semiotic sign-action cannot work at all without interpretation. So, we spent time examining target audiences and hypothesising (through four existential states of BE-ing) their needs.
So we end this second season of Semiosis 101with a fresh perspective and repositioning on your role as a visual communicator.
Season two’s Semiotic Rosetta Stone metaphor has helped reframe your creative role as a facilitator of behavioural changes in your audience, through what you design or illustrate. Jorge Frascara would be proud of you.
By beginning to encode Semiosis in your ideation from insights gained from a working hypothesis (which was developed by using abductive reasoning), you can reveal what visual qualities can unite the audience. These qualities offer tantalising visual semiotic hooks to their attention.
Next week we will preview Semiosis 101 season three’s theme, and have some further exciting news on Semiosis 101’s work to make semiotics easier to apply for you illustrators and designers. So subscribe and come back.
Watch the free video on YouTube for the full impact…