What makes a semiotician tick? SEMIOVOX’s Josh Glenn has invited his fellow practitioners in the field of commercial semiotics, from around the world, to answer a few revealing questions.

San Francisco…

SEMIOVOX

When you were a child/teen, how did your future fascination with symbols, cultural patterns, interpreting “texts,” and getting beneath the surface of daily life manifest itself?

SUNDARI SHELDON

I recently saw a TikTok where someone asked why the world looks so gray compared to when we were kids. I love that lens for thinking about my childhood. I remember everything being oversaturated in the best way. Whether that was the actual reality or simply how life feels next to adulthood, signs just felt especially vivid back then. My entire life was shaped by the content I consumed, and I was completely unconscious of how deliberate that process was.

Once I got access to the internet, I preferred looking up words in Urban Dictionary instead of Merriam‑Webster. Online was where I started to understand the quirks of language and the power of digital collaboration. I learned about subcultures and how culture can be cut and labeled with hashtags. I loved that online, there were essentially languages forming that adults couldn’t understand, and this was dramatically changing wider linguistic patterns.

A big moment came in 2015, when Oxford Dictionaries named the laughing/crying emoji their word-of-the-year. It was my most‑used emoji, yet I had never considered that it carried real linguistic weight. That announcement shifted my view of what counts as language and how quickly meaning can evolve.

This made me notice how meaning was being made everywhere, not just online. I loved exploring New York subway stations. On a single train ride, I could see ridiculous ads, graffiti tags, and a couple’s declaration of love scratched into a bench.

I was always reading the visual language around me. I just didn’t know there was a name for it yet!

SEMIOVOX

Describe your first encounter(s) with the theory and practice of semiotics.

SUNDARI SHELDON

I first encountered semiotics in a Sociology class. The unit was short, but it finally gave a label to something I was already doing. Finding out there was a whole discipline devoted to my habit felt like the biggest relief — especially as an undecided college student. 

But what made it unappealing to me in an educational setting was that a lot of the theory felt stuck in the classroom. I didn’t know that there were actually useful ways to use the ideas I was learning about in the real world.

Which is why discovering its real-world applicability later became the most exciting thing about semiotics for me.

SEMIOVOX

How did you find your own way to doing semiotics?

SUNDARI SHELDON

I googled “semiotics jobs near me.” Unsurprisingly, there were not many direct leads, but I ended up falling into the broader cultural insights space. I was extremely lucky to gain agency experience while still in school, which gave me hands-on experience applying cultural frameworks to real client problems.

While balancing part-time work and school, I published my first piece of work, Rulebook From A 21-Year-Old Semiotician (Purposefully Pretentious). That project allowed me to present semiotics in a way that felt very real to me, and seeing it in bookshops or in my friends’ hands made the discipline real for me.

Those combined experiences (agency work and personal projects) gave me the confidence and portfolio to start freelance semiotics work after graduation.

SEMIOVOX

What are the most important attributes of a good semiotician?

SUNDARI SHELDON

Clients often arrive with their own best guesses; a good semiotician will not force things to fit a client’s narrative. Our job is to follow our curiosity, test the hypotheses, and then translate what we find into something that will be useful. Sometimes the truth supports clients’ hunches, but sometimes it reframes it. Either way, the value comes from adding depth without overriding the project. 

Also, don’t be embarrassed by how you consume culture. I used to feel guilty about my social media usage, but I’ve learned that it was actually a research advantage. Being genuinely plugged into digital culture — not just observing it from the outside — gave me insights that I might’ve otherwise missed.

But I’m finding that my best insights come from stepping back to see larger cultural cycles. Right now, we’re headed toward an anti-entertainment world. People are exhausted by manufactured, oversaturated content and have lost the ability to distinguish real from fake. I’m including myself there. My best insights now come from slowing down (writing in notebooks instead of immediately asking AI, sitting with questions rather than seeking instant answers). My screen time has gone down exponentially, and I’m able to think about cultural patterns more deeply now.

SEMIOVOX

What three books about semiotics have you found the most useful and enlightening in your own work?

SUNDARI SHELDON

I’m interpreting this as texts that encourage semiotic thinking…

• Adorno and Horkheimer’s “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.” II think about this essay whenever I feel myself slipping into insincere work. For example, if  I’m tempted to just tell a big client what they want to hear or manufacture insights that serve predetermined goals, I remember this critique of how culture is commodified and I try to resist the pull toward pure exploitation.

• Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation. This one has been top-of-mind for me recently. It is a dense read, but the “hyperreal” lens is genuinely useful. Baudrillard helps me recognize when simulation has completely taken over, which happens more often than you’d think — especially in tech, branding/packaging, and digital culture.

• Vogue September issues. They’ve been more influential on my practice than most academic texts because they function as a sort of real-time semiosis. The September issue sets the tone for fall/winter (arguably the most important collections for designers), but it’s also basically an “ads” issue. The magazine adds significantly more pages to allow for advertising and those spots are expensive due to high demand. Yes, theory books tell you how signs work, but these issues present signs at the highest level of cultural production. Vogue is definitely not a perfect publication, but even their missteps reveal cultural tensions worth tracking.

SEMIOVOX

When someone asks you to describe what you do, what is your “elevator pitch”? How do you persuade a skeptical client to take a chance on using this tool?

SUNDARI SHELDON

In a casual setting, I usually default to telling people that I work in marketing or advertising.

If someone seems genuinely curious, I gauge how familiar they are with semiotics. I’ll often find that they have followed trends or thought about symbols but get stuck on the “why.” In most cases, I explain that I map the codes underneath those feelings so brands can position themselves more intentionally. If they are not familiar at all, or not very interested, I just keep it simple: “I study symbols.”

With a skeptical client, I start by asking why they reached out; or if I’ve reached out to them, I ask how things are going. There is almost always a pain point: stagnant growth, a redesign, a new audience. My goal is to show that semiotics does not replace their instincts: It gives structure and evidence so decisions are clearer and less risky.

SEMIOVOX

What specific sorts of semiotics-driven projects do you find to be the most enjoyable and rewarding?

SUNDARI SHELDON

I like projects that don’t come with expectations. I’m into people and companies who are curious about what they might be missing. With these projects, I can research however I want — talk to people, scroll, read, observe, and interact in ways that feel both familiar and new. 

I mostly move between San Francisco and New York, plus some global projects. In SF, I’m often with tech and AI people. These people are brilliant at building products, but sometimes blind to how these concepts will land after deployment. I find myself answering questions about the humans they are building for, and that work feels pretty important given the very real concerns around AI. In NY, I’m really into projects that allow me to analyze subcultures and development of identity/personal style.

Overall, the most rewarding projects are collaborative, in-person, and provocative. I enjoy being in a room with designers, researchers, and engineers, building together and experiencing those  “oh shit” moments where it feels like I’ve helped locate a missing piece.

SEMIOVOX

What frustrates you about how semiotics is practiced and/or perceived, right now?

SUNDARI SHELDON

Semiotics has trapped itself in a niche, esoteric space that makes it vulnerable to obsolescence. If people can’t grasp what we do or why it matters, they’ll find other tools that seem more practical.

I’m trying to figure out new ways to make semiotics more accessible. The goal isn’t to oversimplify, but to show people that this way of thinking about culture is learnable and useful for anyone trying to understand how meaning gets made.

SEMIOVOX

What advice would you give to a young person interested in this sort of work?

SUNDARI SHELDON

Sometimes you need to go really deep and explore the texts, but sometimes you need to put that stuff to the side, make a good pun, and do good work by not taking things too seriously.

MAKING SENSE series: MARTHA ARANGO (Sweden) | MACIEJ BIEDZIŃSKI (Poland) | BECKS COLLINS (England) | WHITNEY DUNLAP-FOWLER (USA) | IVÁN ISLAS (Mexico) | WILLIAM LIU (China) | SÓNIA MARQUES (Portugal) | CHIRAG MEDIRATTA (India / Canada) | SERDAR PAKTIN (Turkey / England) | MARIA PAPANTHYMOU (Greece / Russia) | XIMENA TOBI (Argentina) | & many more.

Also see these global semio series: MAKING SENSE (Q&As) | SEMIOFEST SESSIONS (monthly mini-conferences) | COVID CODES | SEMIO OBJECTS | COLOR CODEX | DECODER (fictional semioticians) | CASE FILE | PHOTO OP | MEDIA DIET | TATTOO YOU (semioticians’ tattoos).