Design: dall’oggetto al progetto

La progettualità, e quindi la possibilità di costruire identità culturali, è frutto di una incessante attività di interpretazione orientata verso un fine. La forma che diamo agli artefatti e all’esperienza è essa stessa interpretazione di un desiderio così come di una necessità o di un ideale sociale. È qui che entra in campo la semiotica. In particolare la semiotica che pone la massima attenzione ai processi interpretativi quale strumento di trasformazione e progetto

Design as translation activity: a semiotic overview

The paper moves from the following question: can the design activity, intended as inventive and project-making activity, be viewed also as a form of translation? The answer such question compels us to overcome a paradox, because design does not involve a transfer from a source text from which it translates. Design generally acts like a translator and interpreter of social needs that previously exist as unstructured, non-textual, open-ended entities, thus exposed to uncertainty and incoherence and striving through design to acquire a proper structure, i.e. a textual form. From the extensive literature on the subject in semiotics and linguistics, here we will select and outline only the fundamental semiotic models that could help us overcome the paradox at least from a theoretical viewpoint and provide a plausible answer to our opening question

Qual semiótica para o design? A via pragmatista e a construção de una semiótica do projeto

The project semiotic – the project one, not only the design one – should have as goal being put as a discipline of investigation to better understand the meaning of goods production, of social relations mediated by artifacts and in an ultimate analysis of the ways throughout human communities take form. In the pragmatist vision the future is not an object of forecast, like happens in some sciences – like meteorology – that have the task of informing us what might happen tomorrow. In pragmatism, to say in the pragmatist design, the future is pre-configured: displaying things in such a way that through it future might happen. Pre-configuration is the mental act that prepares the project. The pragmatist design, in resume, should be the way of projecting the world we live in, thinking about the consequences that, in all circumstances we may conceive, can influence our ways of acting and thinking. The pragmatic maxim we put in the center of our discourse tells us, in fact, that every projectual act is necessarily an open process, because it is dominated by the idea of possibility: every object of our conception foresees and prepares others. Signs may transform life, but we have to know how to manage them

The Abduction of the Future. Between inventive thinking and speculative design

Evolutionary history, writes Peirce, teaches us that the future influences the present: it conditions it, puts it into question, and places it in a state of planning. To be in evolution, as well as to feel part of a history, means to project oneself, to form an idea, a prefiguration, of what we could be in a future state, no matter how distant. The logical form of every design and the inventive process is abduction, in particular projective abduction, which proposes as the object of discovery an object or event that has yet to be realized. In this sense, abduction can also be defined as the semiotics of the possible. Is it possible to outline an abductive design method? My contribution aims to discuss how abduction, and with it, everything that contributes to the formation of an inventive habit, can be considered as the ineliminable step of every design process. This is the case of Speculative Design, which has had the credit of introducing the notion of possibility into design thinking

Semiotica e territorio: il vedere progettuale

In generale, la semiotica si occupa di cogliere il senso delle cose e di tutto ciò che produce significato: parole, immagini, convenzioni sociali, oggetti d’uso, edifici, e altro ancora. Ma come possiamo identificare o definire il senso di uno spazio, di un paesaggio che visitiamo, specie quando questo si presenta senza una propria ed esplicita struttura significante? Perché ogni spazio e soprattutto luogo – ossia uno spazio che risente delle tracce della nostra presenza – ha, e non può non avere, un senso: qualcosa che ci parla oltre le sue apparenze. Il saggio indaga sullo sguardo semiotico sul territorio. Perché il progetto del territorio e sul territorio richiede un’attitudine interpretativa, una sorta di allenamento al vedere interpretante, al vedere progettuale

Semiotica del progetto: la via pragmatista

The semiotics research in the design field often deals with the problem of meaning. Beyond aesthetic and functional issues, it is a “problem” due to its relation with the fact that the world of the artifacts is not always structured as a system of signification, where the meaning identification of an object is often merely a descriptive exercise. The vision of the artifacts within the social practices still – even if relevant in the socio-semiotics – leads, in my view, to partial results. Thus, from where should one start to identify the sense of things? The answer, that is, the direction of research, theoretical and applied, is then sought within the Peircean pragmatistic view of meaning: the sense and the meaning of objects are in the mental habits and behavior they are able to produce. Then, it is a matter of searching the sense of things in the ways through which the objects are able to influence and guide our will to act and think. This has significance not only in the everyday practice, but also in the mental formation (e.g. preferences, ideological positioning, etc.), starting with the idea that «what a thing means is simply what habits it involves» (CP 5.400)

The Consequences of Things. The Semiotics and the Pragmatistic Route to Designing

The starting point of this contribution is the concept of “sense”, which derives from the Charles S. Peirce’s semiotic view: “Our idea of anything is our idea of its sensible effects” (Peirce, CP 5.401). For Peirce, the meaning – or sense – of any sign (text, artifact, system) comes surrounded with all the conceivable effects and the “practical consequences” that the sign produces or could produce. However, among the practical consequences, could be also included the formation of beliefs and the definition of individual or social behaviour through habits, and furthermore – in the long run – the very organization of political life. From this derives the responsibility of design, which stimulates an improvement of the consumer goods production (sort of an extension of the design, widening its application in more areas: communication, services, ecology etc.) in the cultural context where part of the social and the planet lives are decided. In this perspective, the sense is no longer just a semantic value within a system, such as the structuralist tradition has taught us, but is open and attempts to a pragmatic dimension. That is, the sense is not found only in texts and artifacts, but above all in the living scene of use: in the context where the objects are found and used

L’oggetto del progetto. Saggi, dialoghi e lezioni di semiotica intorno al design e all’inventiva progettuale

Questo libro è una raccolta di saggi, lezioni e dialoghi intorno all’attività progettuale, alla semiotica del progetto, all’universo degli oggetti e degli artefatti, al design e ai suoi prodotti. Nell’insieme, è un discorso che procede per tappe e digressioni intorno al tema dell’inventiva progettuale. I testi scelti formano un agile tracciato didattico

Nota finale

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