Ethnosemiotics and Design. A Contribution to a Symptomatology of Design

Abstract

Ethnosemiotics, a term included in the Greimas and Courtès dictionary, has been applied to various objects of observation in recent years. Ethnosemiotics does not simply consist in the semiotic analysis of ethnographic material; its ambition is rather to investigate the conditions of possibility of observation. Learning a method to observe objects in the context of everyday life, becoming aware of the planned and unforeseen relationships that occur between the actors that populate it, understanding the consequences of the project in the context in which the design will operate: this is the ambition of ethnosemiotics applied to design. The intervention presents the potential of the method and some preliminary results.

Keywords

• design
• ethnosemiotics
• sociosemiotics
• symptom
• metasemiotics
• constructivism
• etnosemiotica
• sociosemiotica
• sintomo
• metasemiotica
• costruttivismo