Journal 14: Design and Cultural Semiology.

Looking back on this course, I’ve come away with a deeper understanding of how visual analysis and design semiotics intersect with design work, and how I can apply it to fields like HCI and UI. While I had previously approached a lot of my design work primarily through a functional or interaction-based lens, this course taught me to see visual language as something that constructs meaning beyond usability.

First, from McLuhan’s hot and cold media, I thought about my assumptions on what qualifies as “media” in the first place, and how we can take McLuhan’s definitions and semiology to examine media in the context of things after his time. Before this class, I mostly thought of media as things like video, print, or digital screens. But McLuhan’s broader definition, that media are any extensions of ourselves, expanded my thinking, since I did not consider things like a clock or a light media. This makes me think about interfaces and “micromedia” within something like a website, where things like sliders, a QR code, or a voice interface aren’t just functional elements, but mediums themselves with their own drawbacks and affordances.

From the map section in the course and their codings I better understand that abstract concepts can be represented, or misrepresented, depending on its visual content/contexts, and how things even beyond traditional maps can be coded for different purposes. In my cosmic life map, I set out to represent a human lifespan in relation to the age of the universe. Through the readings and design experimentations, I learned that how we visualize something determines how we understand it. This can be applied to things like interface designs where some buttons often don’t have things like text to guide a user, so thinking about all the way people understand something is important. The way we draw a timeline or a graph, or where and why we place a button affects what the user perceives as important, central, or marginal.

Lastly, was how visual cues and symbols can carry ideological weight. Drawing from my project on the prohibition circle and other students' projects, a big takeaway is not whether these signs were legible or universal, but how basic forms can carry political, historical, or emotional connotations depending on their placement and context, and how these things can influential in how the design currently looks, and how we can redesign them for better. A red triangle doesn’t just signal danger, it can evoke state control, authority, or exclusion depending on how and where it appears, and different people may read it differently depending on things like their culture, language, or previous connotations with similar forms. This pushes me to look beyond function and consider the cultural charge embedded in visual elements, no matter how small.

These insights have broadened my design perspective, and allow for different ways of looking at all aspects of design. Instead of looking at things like interaction not just as a point of functionality, but as a moment of semiotic and meaning exchange.