Making Something with Some Things

I studied English literature before going to RISD. I have always been a little worried about graduate school for graphic design. It’s “lite” academics—desperately trying to be real scholarship. I’m trying to get away from that as much as possible.

Tom’s essay on semiotics explicitly excludes “semiology,” the French variant of semiotics, which I think is a problem.The main idea he takes from semiotics is the classification of icon/index/symbol. Also, the idea of the “interpretant,” which is really mystified by the people at RISD, to the point that it’s not useful. The more I think about it, the goal was to use semiotics to legitimize design by giving it its own metalanguage. It was more a strategy of professionalism than a strategy of criticism. Theory ends up narrowing the perspective rather than opening it up, because it becomes an end in itself.

Deconstruction can never really determine the way work looks. It can reform the profession, but it can’t effect the way things look. It can change the way we think about absolutes and the goals of the profession. We can’t expect theory to determine the way things look. People expect to much when they think that visual work must bear the scars of theory.

The use of semiotics at RISD came out of the 60s idea of design process and problem-solving. Sharon Poggenpohl did a course on problem-solving using a matrix….Tom has an “interpretant” matrix—a way to jog yourself into getting ideas. I think that theory got sort of stuck there. Tom didn’t really know what was happening with theory in the 70s and 80s. He wasn’t up on post-structuralism, or even structuralism. No one was writing new material on Peircian semiotics. And yet so much was being written in the 70s and 80s in the tradition of semiology that was relevant to design. But he had written off that tradition.