Design: Digital semiotik og materielkultur

The present Ph.D. thesis aims to construct a theoretical contribution to the understanding and interpretation of the use of digital technologies within a design context. Situated within an interdisciplinary perspective the study is mainly concerned with three dimensions. First, it endeavours to understand the many aspects of design within rearticulated frameworks of semiotics and material culture. Second, it aims to sketch possible strategies and applications of this framework in relation to digital design technologies and products. Third, is demonstrates and localize the theoretical findings in two empirical case studies, and attempts to use these local findings in an enhanced critical understanding of the overall semiotic perspective in relation to digital technologies.

The relatively detailed semiotic framework devised is based on readings of two semiotic traditions that in a supplementary and coherent manner points to the basic conditions for an analytic strategy that could be called “the semiotics of materiel culture”. The first semiotic tradition presented is derived from the works of C.S. Peirce and numerous followers. Three concepts in particular, that of a semiotic community, semiotic habit and communication are dealt with in detail, giving way for a dynamic and unified understanding of sign use across the material domains of biology, culture and technology. The second semiotic tradition, coined functional semiotics, has at its core an instrumental model of semiotic acts. The concept of the sign as a tool is used to understand sign use as a multitude of pragmatic actions that utilize various significative strategies to achieve their purpose oriented ends. Thus signs are understood not just as communication using media but as a multitude of indicative, communicative, rhetorical, culture creating and simulative ways of making things signify.

The juxtaposition of the two frameworks under the arching concept of a semiotics of material culture enable a nuanced and broad scoped examination of the relation between designers as sign makers, users of design as sign interpreters, and design products as interpretable in many different cultural settings, or as termed here, between and within semiotic communities, always grounded in the social and material situations that they presuppose.

Having taken a long path through a semiotic foundation, digital technologies are then described and discussed through the concepts of tool, material and medium. Prominently among the findings, the suggestion of a special ‘essence’ of the digital is presented and rejected on several grounds. The digital is reinstated as very real semiotic phenomena affecting the ways the design trade is conceived and the way the culture of design is constituted. Now, instead of establishing a meticulous semiotic of the digital, the preliminary findings are localized in two case studies that demonstrate the precise applicability and flexibility of a semiotic of material culture to cases where digital technologies are involved.

In the first case study based on the history of the iMac computer it is shown how the meaning of a digital thing is transformed in several stages across production, distribution, marketing and consumption. Apparently clear-cut concepts such as user friendliness or technical improvement are seen to be subsumed under what can be described best as design considerations. In the same vein the perspective of a semiotic description of material culture gives depth to an apparently well-known phenomenon.

The second case study is concerned with the meaning and use of the personal computer and other digital technologies in a particular Danish design school and more general in the light of efforts to professionalize the trade. The study of the school was based on ethnographic fieldwork and revealed that it is not possible or even desirable to describe design as one, unified activity with a common use and understanding of digital technologies. Instead dissimilar strategies of coping with technology was used among different sub disciplines of the school, i.e. graphic designers, fashion designers, textile designers, ceramic form givers, etc. Focusing on the general traits of the professional situation of designers in Denmark the profession of design is characterized a weak profession and explanations are sought in the historical relations to technology of the various sub disciplines.

Based on the local findings of the case studies, the thesis delivers a semiotic critique of the various utopias connected with the introduction of digital technologies within design. It is concluded that although there may be digital interesting metaphysical implications there is no special difference between digital and other technologies concerning their meaning and appropriation within material cult.