Design as communication? If design is communication, who is the sender, who is the receiver and what is the message?

Abstract

[Abstract] Design or, more precisely, the designed artifact has been addressed either as a problematic of down scaled architectural semiotics or as a branch of visual semiotics. However, a genuine tradition of design semiotics does exist. On of its founders was Argentine architectural theorist and historian, Juan Pablo Bonta whose theories have been accessible to an English reading public since the early 1970’s. Bonta’s approach is explicitly normative. His perspective on the creation and exchange of meaning in and with objects for use is that of the designer. In his writings on the subject he introduced, first, three sign categories of relevance to the description of how meaning is generated: signals, indicators and intended indicators. Later he included a fourth category, the ‘pseudo signal’. Finally he excluded the latter and ended up with the original three. In this paper an attempt will be made to rephrase Benta’s theory of design semiotics. To be more accurate, Bonta’s categories will function here as a point of departure for a more unfolded theory of how design may, or may not, function as communication and an alternative resource of meaning construction. In relation to Bonta’s ideas, the paper will aim at introducing a schematic model of interaction that focuses on the roles played by different actors in the process of exchange. In addition to Bonta, the paper will present a model of a more complete understanding of ‘what’ and ‘who’ is actually letting the different sign functions ‘happen’. In order to do so, all four of Bonta’s sign categories are kept alive, and a fifth category is introduced; the ‘signalled indicator’. The model of creation and exchange of meaning in and with design aims at substituting the traditional communication model, which has had an enormous impact on ideas of meaning in design. However this paper maintains that there is no reason to believe, that design — obviously apart from communication design — actually communicates meaning. It’s more complex — and more simple than that.