Readings 6

Semiotics: a primer of designers – Challis Hodge

- Author: “Semiotics is important for designers as it allows us to understand the relationships between signs, what they stand for, and the people who must interpret them — the people we design for.”

- Chandler: “The study of signs is the study of the construction and maintenance of reality. To decline such a study is to leave to others the control of the world of meanings.”

- Becoming aware of these systems and rules and learning to master them is the true power of visual communication and design.

- Semiotics teaches us as designers that our work has no meaning outside the complex set of factors that define it; the deeper our understanding and awareness of these factors, the better our control over the success of the work products we create; helps us not to take reality for granted as something that simply exists; helps us to understand that reality depends not only on the intentions we put into our work but also the interpretation of the people who experience our work

- The meaning of a sign is not in its relationship to other signs within the language system but rather in the social context of its use. The study of semiotics needs to account for the relationship of the symbols and the social context or context of use.

- The disciplines involved in semiotics include linguistics (where it began), and has been adopted by disciplines such as philosophy, psychology, sociology, anthropology, literature, aesthetic and media theory,

- Semiology aims to take in any system of signs, whatever their substanceand limits; images, gestures, musical sounds, objects, and the complex associations of all these, which form the content of ritual, convention or public entertainment: these constitute, if not languages, at least systems of signification.

- Structuralism is an analytical method used by many semioticians. Structuralists seek to describe the overall organization of sign systems as languages.

- Semantics focuses on what words mean while semiotics is concerned with how signs mean.

- Semiotics is the study of sign processes, or signification and communication, signs and symbols.
* Semantics: the relationship of signs to what they stand for.
* Syntactics (or syntax): the formal or structural relations between signs.
* Pragmatics: the relation of signs to interpreters.

- A text is an assemblage of signs constructed with reference to the conventions associated with a genre and in a particular medium of communication. Text usually refers to a message, which has been recorded in some way so that it is physically independent of its sender or receiver.

- Language (code): the system of rules and conventions which is independent of, and pre-exists, individual users ; Speech (message): its use in particular instances
For examples: any specific film is the speech of that underlying system of cinema language.





The Reflective Practitioner: how professional think in action- Donald Schon
Summary: An analysis of the distinctive structure of reflection-in-action. He explores the relationship between the kinds of knowledge honored in academia and the kinds of competence valued in professional practice.

- professions had come to be seen as vehicles for the application of the new sciences to the achievement of human progress: engineers became a model of technical practice for the other professions, medicine was refashioned in the new image a science-based technique for the preservation of health

- 3 principal doctrines of Positivism (a dominant philosophy): the conviction that empirical science was not just a form of knowledge but the only source of positive knowledge of the world; intention to cleanse men’s minds of mysticism, superstition, and other forms of pseudoknowledge; the program of extending scientific knowledge and technical control to human society, to make technology

- 2 kinds of meaningful propositions: analytic and essentially tautological propositions of logic and mathematics/ the empirical propositions which express knowledge of the world.

- Positivists recognized to what extent observational statements were theory-laden, and found it necessary to ground empirical knowledge in irreducible elements of sensory experience. They began to see laws of nature not as facts inherent in nature hut as constructs created to explain observed phenomena, and science became for them a hypothetico-deductive system.

- actual practice of phenomena-complexity, uncertainty, instability, uniqueness, and
value-conflict do not fit in the model of Technical Rationality. Positivism solved the puzzle of practical knowledge in a way that had been foreshadowed by the Technological Program

- professional practice is a process of problem solving. Problems of choice or decision are solved through the selection of the one best suited to established ends. With emphasis on
problem solving, we ignore problem setting (the process by which we define the decision
to be made, the ends to be achieved, the means which may be chosen)

- To convert a problematic situation to a problem, a practitioner must make sense of an uncertain situation that initially makes no sense. Professionals are coming to recognize that although problem setting is a necessary condition for technical problem solving, it is not itself a technical problem.
To solve a problem by the application of existing theory or technique, a practitioner must be able to map those categories onto features of the practice situation.

- Knowing-in-action refers to the kinds of knowledge we can only reveal in the way we carry out tasks and approach problems.
- Reflection-in-action is the ability of professionals to ‘think what they are doing while they are doing it’.

- Reflection-in-action is an extraordinary process; is the core of practice for some practitioners; is not generally accepted because professionalism is still identified with technical expertise.
It is the kind of reflection that occurs whilst a problem is being addressed, in what Schon calls the ‘action-present’ (the zone of time in which action can still make a difference to the situation). It is a response to a surprise – where the expected outcome is outside of our knowing-in-action. The reflective process is at least to some degree conscious, but may not be verbalised. Reflection-in-action is about challenging our assumptions. It is about thinking again, in a new way, about a problem we have encountered.

- When someone reflects-in-action, he becomes a researcher in the practice context.
He is not dependent on the categories of established theory and technique, but constructs
a new theory of the unique case. His inquiry is not limited to a deliberation about means
which depends on a prior agreement about ends. He does not keep means and ends
separate, but defines them interactively as he frames a problematic situation. He does
not separate thinking from doing, ratiocinating his way to a decision which he must later
convert to action.

- Reflection-in-action is important because dilemma of rigor or relevance may be dissolved if we can develop an epistemology of practice which places technical problem solving within a broader context of reflective inquiry, shows how reflection-in-action may be rigorous in its own right, and links the art of practice in uncertainty and uniqueness to the scientist’s art of research.