Semiotics is the discipline that studies how signs produce meaning. Applied to design, it helps us understand how objects communicate values, roles, and worldviews, even in the absence of words.
An object is never neutral: it is designed by someone, placed in a cultural context, and interpreted by its users. Semiotics does not only ask what an object represents, but analyzes the relationships it activates: with the body, with other objects, with daily practices, and with social systems.
In this sense, semiotics does not merely decode isolated objects; it studies the networks of relationships that generate meaning and helps us understand how objects influence behavior, emotions, and interpretations of the world around us (Mangano & Ventura Bordenca, 2024).
Greimas and Structural Semiotics
Algirdas Julien Greimas (1917–1992) is one of the fathers of modern semiotics. His theory showed that meaning does not arise from isolated elements but from relationships and oppositions. Meaning is always constructed: through structures, roles, and values in tension with each other.
Applied to design, this perspective implies that an object communicates not only through its function but also through the value it assumes within a system of oppositions such as useful/useless, simple/complex, modern/traditional. Every artifact, therefore, is never neutral: it is part of a kind of everyday narrative, assuming different roles and guiding behavior, perception, and social interactions.
A chair, for example, is not just a support for sitting; it can communicate elegance, informality, authority, or a particular lifestyle.
Floch and the Semiotics of Design
Jean-Marie Floch (1947–2001) applied Greimas’ semiotics to design, visual communication, and consumption. In his book Visual Identities (1995), Floch demonstrates how even a simple object, like the Opinel knife, can communicate much more than its function.
The Opinel is not just a cutting tool: through its essential form, humble materials, mass production, and rural associations, it conveys values of authenticity, tradition, simplicity, and reliability. It is an object that tells a way of life and a cultural belonging even before it is used.
For Floch, objects are actants: not passive tools, but elements capable of acting on humans, guiding behavior, choices, and desires. The object becomes the protagonist in the relationship with the user.
One of his best-known contributions is the semiotic square of values, often used to analyze products, brands, and communication. Floch identifies four major value regimes:
- Practical → function, utility, efficiency
- Utopian → ideal values, identity, vision
- Critical → quality/price ratio, rationality
- Ludic → pleasure, aesthetics, gratuitousness
These values do not exclude each other but coexist and balance. Every object or design project communicates a specific combination of these regimes.
Semiotics of design, therefore, does not study “what an object means,” but how it produces meaning within a system of relationships.
Sources:
• Mangano, D., & Ventura Bordenca, I. (Eds.). (2024). Stories of Semiotics and Design. AIS/Design Journal: History and Research, Vol. 11, No. 20.
• Greimas, A. J. (1987). On Meaning: Selected Writings in Semiotic Theory. University of Minnesota Press.
• Floch, J.-M. (1995). Visual Identities. Continuum.
