Design as Meaning Making: From Making Things to the Design of Thinking

Overview This paper redefines design based on the realization that communication design, first and foremost, concerns meaning. It distinguishes between intended, constructed, and received or re-constructed meaning. Design is the activity that directs the process, and enables the correspondence between the three. By focusing on received meaning, it shifts design paradigm, from a preoccupation with designing objects for certain uses to focusing on the cognitive processes that underlie the reception of those designs. It defines designs as cognitive interfaces that enable reconstruction of intended meanings. Its approach stresses the semiotic relations between perception and meaning construction to explain the perceptual and cultural codes involved in communication. The position presented here redirects the perceived ground for design away from objects themselves, as independent from mind, toward the conceptual characteristics these objects embody as a means of communication. It redefines designs from finite, fixed objects of aesthetic and practical consideration to semiotic interfaces enabling the reconstruction of meaning by receivers. It challenges the fixation of designs on aesthetic justification by shifting attention to the semiotic functions of cognitive interfaces. Thus, design is approached as a semiotic phenomenon, which is dependent on cognitive and developmental processes, and which coexists with cultural codifications comprising collective and individual environments. Design draws upon the concept of diagrammatic reasoning, and proposes that all designs be regarded as diagrams of mental maps of individual and collective cultures. Its focus on the diagrammatic nature of knowledge presentation necessitates the emergence of intelligent design as informed by a rational selection and a combining of visual syntax to induce specific inferences followed by subsequent behaviors. Communication designers historically have not had adequate rational tools to bridge the gap between meaning and design decisions at the level of design form manipulation. The reliance on aesthetics and style is symptomatic of this gap. This paper demonstrates the possibility of bridging that gap.