Making Sense
"A label, a framing choice, a repeated gesture, a category, a visual convention, a protocol: these are often the places where larger systems become visible."
Making Sense
What makes semioticians tick? We asked members of the international community of semiotic practitioners to answer 10 questions. Here's a series overview, organized by region.
Making Sense
"Make abstract ideas and observations clear, without losing the rigour or wonder of whatever ideas you had in the first place. "
Making Sense
"Unlike LLMs, we help build a deep understanding of culture, not just engage in pattern recognition."
Making Sense
"You notice when a system is addicted to an old myth it can no longer metabolize."
Making Sense
"If analysis doesn’t restore the beauty, texture, or emotional vibration of an object, it becomes abstract."
Making Sense
"Do not rely only on your intuition or gut, but make sense of them using concepts, models and instruments produced by semioticians."
Making Sense
"I enjoy this discipline's ability to open minds, reveal new possibilities and energise people."
Making Sense
"Even when a project isn’t explicitly semiotic, the principles guide how I approach my ethnographic and cultural work."
Making Sense
"The leading edge of culture emerges first in the sensorial and experiential before it can be articulated in more cerebral ways."
Making Sense
"It’s an almost compulsive need to keep asking why, again and again, without settling too quickly on answers."
Making Sense
"Semiotics is clever and brilliant. It doesn’t need to try so hard to sound clever and brilliant."
Making Sense
"Semiotic researchers tend to be good people — perhaps because they share a fundamental openness toward understanding cultures other than their own."
Making Sense
"You already have so much knowledge to draw on from your observations — things you’ve noticed, trends you’ve spotted, cultural knowledge unknowingly assimilated, years of training on method."