Semiotics and designing

Preamble: theory and practice Semiotics has been present in design theory for a considerable time: twenty-five years, at least. It has had a ghostly presence, as a possibility or promise, but never quite pinned down; its identity and its place within design have remained uncertain.Two factors can be identified as explanations of this. First, the problems of the semiotic enterprise itself. Is it a discipline in its own right, or rather a mediating inter-discipline? An art or a science? What is its relation to linguistics? Semiotics or semiology? Peirce or Saussure? And, if Saussure, then in which edition?The semiotic literature is large in ground-clearing discussion of such issues, and not so large in contributions that put semiotic ideas into practice.The second factor in the frustrated relation of semiotics to design has been the difficulties of designers in constructing theories about their own activities. What is the nature of design? Is it sensible to think of one all-embracing activity of design, from engineering at one extreme to fashion design at another? If it is a job and a profession, can it be a discipline too? Can it have its own theories, or must it always borrow from other fields of theory? Given the intractability of these conundrums, it is no wonder that the theme of semiotics and design has proved so largely unrewarding.

The notion of a theory of design can be clarified by making the distinction between ideas or theories that bear on the practice of designing, and those that concern the criticism or appreciation of design work. Of course, this cannot be a sharp distinction. Designers are ordinary people too: we live in a common world. Historical knowledge, for example, spans the divisions of design practice and criticism of design; while it may be generated by non-practitioners, it feeds into the consciousness of those producing new artefacts. And, in general, it is a condition of the well-being of designing and design theory that they stay in touch with the common world: the world for which they work. Nevertheless, despite this recognition of shared ground, the very notion of designing, as a distinct and professionalized activity, carries with it the supposition that there

could be a body of theory peculiar to it. So one can proceed on the assumption that there will be a need for theories that bear on the practice of design - the field of design method - and, as another matter (though a related one), for theories that illuminate design products.

Much of what is said of semiotics suggests that it belongs with those theories that help us to understand the products of design. Thus David Sless (1986) likens the semiotician to a fashion critic (not a designer). Semiotics is always described as being concerned with reading, with decoding, with interpreting.These are essential activities - and reading is certainly an activity and a construction of meaning. Nevertheless, to interpret something given is one thing; to determine and to oversee its material production is another. Again, the distinction is not an absolutely clear one, and should not be overstressed. For designing is not creation out of nothing (as in the idea of the genius-artist, conjuring unexplainable beauties from a void). Rather it is a matter of working, usually with given materials, constrained by many interconnected and often pressing factors.

Consider a graphic designer, hurrying to complete layouts for a catalogue by next Monday. Which photographs to choose? It may be a compromise between those that show best what needs to be shown, and those that show less but which would reproduce better. The designer acts as an interpreter of the meaning of images; and it is in such moments that theoretical understanding comes to play its part in practical design work.To stay with this example of choosing photographs, it may well be that recent developments of theory, in discussions of the meanings of images, are coming to influence the ways in which designers are deploying images. For example, the question of whether to crop an image, whether to show the edge of the frame, whether to bleed it off the page.These questions are absolutely practical (the stuff of everyday graphic design) and also entail matters of high theory, in their concern with the representation of the world: does the imposition of a frame deny the continuum of reality, or does it rather acknowledge that we must always employ such markers in perception?

Such an example suggests that theoretical reflection and practical action do best when they coincide and play off against each other. But theory and practice are different, even if they can be

Intertwined. In the case of the person examining photographs, the activity could be either theoretical or practical - it depends on how I t is directed.The critic may look as intensely as the designer, and may even earn money with this looking (if it results in some article m review), but the difference becomes apparent when we consider the kind of demand placed on each viewer and the contexts in which i he viewers are acting. If the critic works to formulate ideas, the designer works to get the images produced (or reproduced) in a thoroughly real, material sense.While both may work to deadlines and under pressure, the pressures on the designer - the responsibility for a job of production - are of a different kind from those on a critic. So the two worlds of theory and practice come to distinguish themselves: the library or the private study (usually a world of solitary activity), and the more social world of the design office - its shelves populated by trade catalogues, directories, files, and specimens of work.Theory becomes manifest in books and journals, in lecture and seminar rooms - and splits off from the practice of the design office or workshop.

The promise of semiotics I he large and simple attraction of semiotics to design theorists is that it offers a concern with the meaning of objects and images. Information theory, which had provided the set of ideas most borrowed from in conceptions of design activity, can postulate no more than signals: disturbances in a cycle, passing down a channel, from an unintelligent emitter to an unintelligent receiver.There is no semantic dimension here. Semiotics introduces the sign, and with it the whole domain of meaning and the human world; and thus might point a way out of the aridities of information theory.

Information theory may have had its day as a source of ideas and metaphors with which to think about designing (this reliance was at its peak in the 1950s, and lasted well into the 1960s), but we are still living under the spell of information* - with the spread and popularization of information technology. In this now universal phrase, information serves to suggest the component of intelligence or software that differentiates this new technology from the old. On the other hand, and in other contexts, information suggests the communication of essential messages (as against the frip-

peries of press advertising, for example), whose effectiveness can be really evaluated and probably quantified.The name of this journal testifies to the hopes that reside in this notion of information, as do the courses in information design or visual information' that now seem to be springing up - where previously there had been mere graphic design. Manoeuvres in the labelling of courses may not amount to much more than a change of head-gear (with no effect on what goes on underneath) - though, even as such, they suggest at least a wish to come to better grips with the subject. And though the current vogue for information may be partly traceable to a theory that proved a dead end for designers, this cannot be used as a stick with which to beat present attempts to direct graphic design to matters of need.

In this context of information design, with its characteristic emphasis on users requirements, an awareness of the semantic dimension becomes all the more apposite: as a continual reminder that understanding is more than just reception of messages, but entails a construction of meaning and that this meaning is subject to influence from a very large set of factors. In the fundamental insight of Saussure, linguistic signs are arbitrary and unmotivated: there is no necessary connection between the meaning of any word and its phonological structure. But, in the realm of visual depiction too, the meaning of an image is never obvious. A photograph may bear the imprint of reality (light acting on film at the moment of exposure), but even - perhaps especially - the meaning of a photographic image is never obvious. It may show a tree, yes; but what kind of tree? Here it is the viewer who decides, according to learned categories. What season of the year? How old is the tree? When was the photograph taken? Was there a wind blowing? What is the importance of such considerations in understanding the image?

The presence of a semantic dimension is inevitable. It invades even those communications that intend to be purely functional: texts and images are always produced by particular people with par ticular purposes, and so bear the traces of human intention. For example, the character of the producing institution can be seen in the linguistic and visual qualities of government forms: both (as is well understood) in the traditional byzantine-bureaucratic productions, and (as may be less obvious) in the recent experiments in

simplified and humanized forms.The latter lay claim to a new spirit of enlightenment, or efficiency through the language of sympathy.

Analysis of the meanings and motivations of seemingly banal artefacts has indeed been one of the contributions of the semiotic habit of thought, as David Sless suggests.The consideration of semantics can open up the dimensions of ideology and of politics. This semiotic contribution is in the first place to the criticism of products, and it has largely remained as criticism. Any effect on the designers of products has come indirectly, through processes of feedback and through slow infiltration into the common culture.

In considering the possible contribution of semiotics to graphic design, as in the example of a semiotically-inspired analysis of government communications, it is necessary to make an obvious but fundamental distinction within the dimension of meaning. Am text has a level of simple or literal meaning, and a level of attributed meaning. A form that requires a woman to state whether she is married or not has that as part of its literal meaning. An analysis of this question on a deeper level would consider assumptions behind it: of how women and men in this society are expected to conduct their lives; what are normal arrangements; what is accepted or condoned or refused. Such factors seep into the verbal texture of government communications (the smallest details of sentence construction and vocabulary), and they will also, there seems little reason to doubt, mark the visual texture of these productions. Or, to return to the example of the photograph of the tree, the literal meaning of the image has already been disclosed - it is just that (a tree). The further, deeper analysis might consider such things as the way this tree stands against dark clouds: a suggestion of threat; or does the tree betoken shelter and safety from a coming storm? Isolated in this flattened landscape it seems to be a last protest against rapacious agriculture. And so the analysis would go on.

It may be doubted that this kind of analysis has anything especially semiotic* about it. Is this not what any pragmatic commentator, sensitive to meanings and implications, has always done? Insofar as one accepts that semiotics amounts to this kind of analysis, one then accepts that the hoped-for science of signs has become just a style of thought, characterized by a concern to demythologize, to show up latent ideology, using a language marked by a stock of

key words (code, discourse, text, denote, signify, etc). It seems that attempts to develop a strict, quasi-scientific semiotic analysis have been given up by the cultural critics who might contribute to design theory.

The language analogy and its perils One of the attractions of the semiotic view is that it has offered the means of attributing meanings to otherwise mute objects. In one field of design in particular - architecture - semiotics was welcomed by some critics and by theoretically-minded architects as providing a way through the obstacles against which post-Second-World-War versions of modernism had foundered. Semiotics provided a legitimation for elements in a building for which justification on grounds of simple function was lacking: elements of decoration. The vogue for semiotics in architecture is passing, now that the reaction against modernism has gained enough confidence to follow its instincts without intellectual justification. Buildings can again have meanings - as has been their ancient right, until the intervention of certain versions of modernism.

The analogy with language proposed by semioticians has the attraction and the sense of reassurance that is brought by all such attributions of larger significance. Just as with Freudian theories, we are told that however confused and muddled the immediate real ity seems to be, it is amenable to analysis, can be shown to have causes and reasons, and can even be construed as a system. So, if we are to believe the suggestion that communication of all kinds can be understood on the model of verbal language, then we should expect to find an ordering system of the same kind as that found in language.

The difficulties of transposing linguistic analysis to other areas of enquiry are by now clear. For example, in the field of pictorial imagery, if one speaks of the syntax* of an image, what then in the image corresponds to the adjective, what to the noun*, what to the verb, and so on? And even if someone were to posit isolable units, analogous to linguistic ones, in a non-linguistic example, can the analogy be sustained across a large number of examples, as ideas of linguistic structure can? It seems that such analogies can be no more than vague ones, and that they collapse as soon as one tries to work them out in any detail.

A particular confusion is likely in the application of semiotics to graphic design. Semiotics - or rather semiology (the strand that derives not from Peirce but from Saussure, and which has been most influential among commentators on visual images) - has been largely developed by the application of ideas taken from linguistics. This borrowing is evident in the anthropology of Lvi-Strauss, in the cultural analysis of Barthes, the psychoanalysis of Lacan, and in the trains of thought and investigation that all this work has set up. Here the linguistic analogy is stretched beyond mere analogy, to constitute an enormous extension of language itself: the world becomes a text, to be read and decoded or (in the most recent twist of theory) deconstructed.There are considerable objections to thisview.

An immediate and local objection from the point of view of graphic design is the confusion caused when the apparatus of semiotics is applied to material that is closely allied to the linguistic: the text matter which is so large a component of graphic design.The semiotic tools, when turned back from the non-linguistic towards the linguistically saturated object of enquiry, come to seem at best over-emphatic, at worst superfluous.The first, literal meanings of a text can be understood without the application of the special armoury of semiotics, designed to unpick the meanings of mute objects.

Terminological confusions - such as Roger Smith discusses (1986)- make clear the unwieldiness of applying semiotics to graphic design. Words such as sign and symbol, which have acquired precise and specialized meanings in semiotics, are then fed back into the gross, material world of design - where sign may mean a rectangular sheet of wood bearing painted letters. While symbol in semiotics is a fairly precise category of sign, in graphic design it tends to be used very loosely, to refer to any more or less abstracted image that stands in for some idea or human enterprise.These confusions are then compounded by the disagreements within semiotics over terminology. All of which would help to explain why semiotics has never really proved of much assistance in the designing of graphic symbols and systems of symbols - the field for which best hopes for it as a contribution to practice have been expressed.The apparently common terms of semiotic theory and graphic design

seemed to raise in some graphic designers hopes of help from the elixir of the science of signs: ungrounded promise is a characteristic of elixirs; characteristic also is the disappointment that follows application.

The gravest objection to a large strand of semiotics follows from certain emphases of Saussure.1 In making his celebrated distinctions between langue* and parole*, and between synchronic and diachronic approaches to the study of language, Saussure was concerned to move linguistics in the directions indicated by the first terms of these pairs. His aim was a study of the system of language (Ma langue*) and its rules and structures, with correspondingly less interest in the idiosyncrasies of individual utterance (la parole). And linguistics should turn away from its nineteenth-century, exclusively historical (diachronic) concern with the evolution of forms of language - towards a (synchronic) study of the system as a function ing whole, at any one time. Saussures position can be seen as a necessary and appropriate one, given the context in which he was working. But that provides no justification for the semiotic enterprise of taking over Saussurian linguistics and applying it to non-linguistic material. One objection here is the doubtfulness of the linguistic analogy, as already discussed. And this criticism becomes all the stronger when one considers the characteristic emphasis of Saussurian linguistics on structures, without history and removed from the ordinary world of discourse between people. An ahistorical approach may be reasonable in a discussion of language - a uniquely slow-changing and intricate human institution - but such an approach becomes misleading when transferred to material of a quite different character.This material* is just that: composed of physical matter, where, by contrast, language is non-material and abundant. Physical objects, whose meanings the semiotician lays claim to, have a substance and a presence that discussion limited to significance* and structure* (mental, abstract structure) cannot begin to touch.

The tendency of semiotics, particularly as it has been developed

l.This follows the line of argument suggested by Timpanaro (1970, pp. 135-219); and see also the criticisms advanced by Eagleton (1983, pp. 109-15) and Anderson (1985, pp. 40-55).

in the hot-houses of seminar rooms and academic journals, has been to ignore the material nature of objects and conditions of production and use (their history). Even in the discussion of literature, where a non-materialist approach might be plausible (if literature is seen as composed of non-material language and ideas), the abstract interests of semiotics have proved unrewarding.Thus, in the literary criticism inspired by the structural anthropology of Lvi-Strauss, the mechanism of a text is unpicked and laid out, usually as a series of binary oppositions; but always leaving the reader with a feeling of so what? what does such analysis explain?The structuralists have not made any impression on the criticism of design, partly for reasons of the non-academic and mysteriously enclosed world of design. Hut it would be hard to see what success structuralism could have in dealing with an activity so embedded in the material world - a world of deadlines, invoices, machine constraints, and the properties of glue.

The distance of recent theory from the world of practice is very marked - ironically - in the work of those who have been among the loudest in professions of materialism and political commitment. In Britain, this may be seen in the field of cultural studies, for example in some of the articles published in the journal Block. The dominant influence here (it is now on the wane) has been the structuralist Marxism of Althusser, in which the business of refining and polishing the theoretical apparatus absorbs all the critics interest and itself comes to be seen as practice; any concern for the world of everyday, practical realities is lost, and, if raised, dismissed as empiricism. History is denied in this synchronic view, and with this denial there disappears any prospect of an explanation of material objects and processes.

The growing body of work in cultural studies is of some importance to the criticism of design - in particular as this exists in the theoretical and historical components of design educational courses (what is called in Britain complementary studies, liberal studies, related studies, or some other suggestion of the rag-bag) - and in view of the possibility that those teaching on these courses will turn to a semiotically-influenced set of ideas as a source of theory.The result of this teaching on the education and practice of designers is not easy to imagine: it is hard to see how what is often

remote theory could impinge on workshop and studio practice. Hut one source of difficulty in this relation is clear: cultural studies has been developed in application to popular culture and is in opposition not only to an exclusive, high culture but also to all distinctions of value within culture. It thus conflicts with the highminded, reforming and occasionally revolutionary tradition of designing (of William Morris - and company), which would certainly maintain distinctions of good and bad in the ways in which the material world is ordered: on such presuppositions must any confident design edu cation be based.

The passing of structuralist semiotics It is characteristic of graphic design education in Britain that it should be registering the presence of semiotics a decade or so after these ideas have passed from the centre of the world of high intellectual discussion.That is, if one identifies semiotics with the Parisian or in fact Barthesian structuralist semiology, rather than with the tradition of Peirce and Charles Morris. In his later writings, Barthes came to abandon the method-governed approach of his structuralist phase (1964a, 1964b) for an approach that absorbed elements of semiotics but which gave up pretensions to strict system (1975, p.145; 1977).

It is not necessary here to investigate in any detail the transforming of structuralism into poststructuralism, and the implications of this mutation for the semiotic theory that had been a part of structuralism. Anderson and Eagleton (both 1983) have provided succinct analyses of this development. It is clear that the shift to poststructuralism promises no benefits for design theory. Its chief ideas and slogans - as they will be percolated into complementary studies courses, for example - offer no better purchase on the world of designing than did structuralism: less, insofar as the notion of language becomes further inflated to eradicate any idea of individual identity and responsibility.The emergence of poststructuralism does however diminish (through its sometimes convincing criticisms of its earlier self) the claims of semiotics to constitute a science or discipline. Semiotics may provide scattered insights, but those still looking for a ready-made theory on which to depend will not find it in the corpus of semiotic writing.

This returns us to the question of a theory of design. It seems clear that no single, self-contained theory will ever be adequate to an activity as complex, various, and as rooted in the material world as designing: and certainly no off-the-peg theory bought from the academic fashion-houses. Design theory needs to correspond to the informal and mixed nature of its object - the activity of designing - and will inevitably borrow ideas, but needs also to think for itself, from practice.

Post-amble: the suggestion of a visual/vcrbal rhetoric This paper has considered relations between semiotics and design, and has assumed some acquaintance with the essential ideas of semiotics, as taken up from the writings of Peirce and Saussure.It may be helpful now to point to the few contributions to the semiotic literature that bear directly on designing.The most substantial work has been that emanating from the Hochschule fiir Gestaltung Ulm, under the guidance of Toms Maldonado. David Sless refers to the papers published in Uppercase (Maldonado and Bonsiepe, separately and jointly, igGiJ.These are of considerable interest, though they suffer from a wooden translation that makes difficult ideas unnecessarily obscure. Work on semiotics by Maldonado (1959) and Bonsiepe (1965; 1968) also appeared, in rather good English versions, in the schools journal Ulm, which may be as inaccessible as Uppercase but is worth the effort of hunting down.The passage on semiotics and design in the book that Maldonado wrote after leaving Ulm (1972, pp. 119-23) is of interest as an epilogue to that phase of work, up to 1968 - the year that proved fatal for the life;, as for other things.The Ulm contribution is still relevant for its strenuous investigation of theories that might bear on practice, and for a continuously critical attitude that enabled it to work through a phase of unreasonable devotion to scientific method and on towards a more socially engaged position.

The work of Maldonado and Bonsiepe (and one or two others associated with the Hfo Ulm) may seem uncomfortably intellectual by certain standards (those of British design journalism, for example), but it never quite loses contact with the ordinary world of designing. One of its contributions was the beginnings of a new visual/verbal rhetoric: conceived as a development from classical

rhetoric, but modified by the inter-discipline of semiotics. A particular appeal of this is its possible function as a common ground for theoretical and practical work.This rhetoric would be a way of understanding the mechanisms of a visual/verbal product and also an aid that could inform (and improve) visual/verbal production. The call for rhetorical analysis has surfaced more recently in the work of some literary critics. Thus Terry Eagleton closes his bracing survey of theories of literature with a proposal for the revival of this ancient practice that saw speaking and writing not merely as textual objects, to be aesthetically contemplated or endlessly deconstructed, but as forms of activity inseparable from the wider social relations between writers and readers, orators and audiences, and as largely unintelligible outside the social purposes and conditions in which they were embedded (1983, p. 206).This remark, with appropriate substitution of terms (designingand producing for speaking and writing, etc), applies just as well to graphic design.

So far, in the articles by Bonsiepe and in Barthess venture into this field (1964b), visual rhetoric has treated only persuasive communication of the most obvious kind - press advertisements. Bonsiepe (1965, p. 30) - writing clearly as a designer - was concerned to dispute the suggestion that persuasive (rhetorical) communication was limited to advertising: Informative assertions are interlarded with rhetoric to a greater or lesser degree. Information without rhetoric is a pipe-dream which ends up in the break-down of communication and total silence. Bure information exists for the designer only in arid abstraction. As soon as he begins to give it concrete shape, to bring it within the range of experience, the process of rhetorical infiltration begins. However, three paragraphs further on, Bonsiepe retreats from this position, and concedes that a train time-table or a table of logarithms might be examples of information innocent of all taint of rhetoric. One doubts this.The truth seems rather to lie in Bonsiepes first and more absolute statement: that as soon as content takes concrete shape* it takes on associations and meanings that exist beyond the hypothetical domain of pure information. Believers in purity of visual/verbal information might seem to be on stronger ground with cases of text or image produced on screens or by highly constrained typewriters.The lesson from such examples might be that a certain degree of technical

sophistication is necessary to enable recognizably different products to be constructed by the same means; and also that a period of time is necessary, while conventions of arrangement evolve.

In two recent papers (1984a; 1984b), Hanno Ehses has revived Bonsiepes suggestion of a visual/verbal rhetoric.2 Ehsess presentation is attractive: since all human communication is, in one way or another, infiltrated rhetorically, design for visual/verbal communication cannot be exempt from that fact (1984b, p. 4). So, he suggests, to accept that all communication is concerned to persuade, is to accept the social and moral-political dimensions of all designing, and it is to accept that all our actions and artefacts must answer to moral-political arguments, and it is to reiterate that there is no sphere of pure technique or pure information.

The difficulties of some new rhetoric appear when one starts on the business of applying the concepts of classical rhetoric in specific instances. One has to get over the barriers of Latin and of the complex definitions of rhetorical figures. In the practical experiment on which he reports, Ehses (1984a) asked his students to design a poster for a performance of Macbeth; each student was to produce a poster that corresponded visually to one of the rhetorical figures (antithesis, irony, metaphor, personification, and so on). The approach seemed successful to Ehses and his students - as a simple aid to thinking and to producing ideas that might not have been promoted otherwise. One knows this as a feature of any design method concerned to generate alternative procedures - and the least virtue of a design method is that it suggests a starting point and a way of getting down to work. At this quite modest level, as a stimulus and a guide to overall concepts in design work, a visual/verbal rhetoric would seem promising - in teaching above

2. Another recent call for a visual rehetoric has come from Michael Tvvyman (1979). Twymans long project of the description and classification of a postulated visual language lies outside the scope of this paper: the linguistic science that he sees as a model for a theory of typography is unspecified, though presumably not of the Saussurian- semiotic variety (Twyman 1982). Hut in this project, as in semiotically- derived work, an informal analogy (visual things are a hit like language: they have meanings) is perilously inflated to a suggestion of elaborate system.

all. But whether this rhetoric can go beyond identification of broad concept (antithesis, etc) to touch the details of text and image has yet to be shown.The dangers of rhetoric are fairly obvious and are evident in the history of the degeneration of classical verbal rhetoric: of a new academicism and formalism, in which guide-lines grow into a restrictive network of fences.

As regards the analysis and criticism of design, the promise of rhetoric is that it can open up communication between the worlds of theory and practice, by providing common terminology and procedures. If this were to prove itself, then rhetoric would have succeeded where semiotics, which has remained irredeemably in the world of theory, has failed. But it is not at all clear how this visual/ verbal rhetoric could extend its concerns back from the artefact produced to the full range of factors that inform the production of the artefact, nor how it could interrogate the fine details of an object. Again, as with semiotics, there is so much that this theory cannot discuss.

References (key dates are those of lirst publication)Anderson, P. 1983. In the tracks of historical materialism, Verso Barthes, R. 1964a. Elements of semiology Jonathan Cape, 1967 Barthes, R. 1964b. Rhetoric of the image, in: R. Barthes, Image, music, text,

Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1977 Barthes, R. 1975. Roland Barthes, Macmillan, 1977 Barthes, R. 1977. inaugural lecture. College de France in: S.Sontag(ed.),

A Barthes reader, Jonathan Cape, 1982 Bonsiepe, G. 1961. 'Persuasive communication: towards a visual rhetoric,

Uppercase, no. 5, pp. 13-34 Bonsiepe, G. 1965. Visual/verbal rhetoric, Ulm, nos. 14/15/16, pp. 23-40 Bonsiepe, G. 1968. Semantic analysis, Ulm, no. 21, pp. 33-7 Eagleton,T. 1983. l iterary theory: an introduction, Oxford: Basil Blackwell Ehses, H. 1984a. RepresentingMacbeth: a case study in visual rhetoric,

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New York: Harper & Row Maldonado,T. and G. Bonsiepe. 1961. Sign system design for operative

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Information Design Journal, vol. 4, no. 3,1986

This article was designed to complement two other pieces in that issue of 1 nj: by David Sless and Roger Smith.

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