Semiotics in Architecture and Industrial/Product Design

Abstract

2) Ernst Haeckel, Generelle Morphologie der Allgemeine Entwicklungsgeschichte der Organismen, Vol. II (Berlin: Reimer, 1866): 286. The Problem This investigation points out commonalities and differences between semiotics of architecture and semiotics of industrial/product design. We shall try to understand what the meanings of and objects might be. My focus is, therefore, on architectural and product semantics. While a linguistic approach to meaning is genuinely semiotic, semiotics is broader than linguistics. Verbal meaning must, therefore, be distinguished from other meanings such as those of and other As a matter of fact, the meaning of verbal and other signs of communication might turn out to be only a subclass of the meaning carried by human instruments in general, namely the subclass of instruments serving communication.1 In order to study their meanings, I single out of the entire ecology of human instruments those called buildings and designed artifacts. I call this approach semiotics, and argue that such an ecological perspective more adequately reflects the reciprocal relationship of humans and their built and artifactual environments than the treatment of and things as abstract objects detached from our bodies. In order to solve our problem, I first define some fundamental concepts of the ecological approach, then sketch an ecological semiotics with special regard to the surfaces and surface layouts of and artifacts, and finally point out some differences between the meaning of and of products as they result from human scale.

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