Semiotics and design, to the future.

Abstract

To conclude, we would like to draw up a chronology of the relations between semiotics and design by picking up where one of the authors of this collective volume, Alvise Mattozzi, left off, that is, from the second half of the 1990s when Floch published, in Identità Visive (1995), an analysis of the Opinel knife. Mattozzi retraces three episodes that he considers fundamental for the history linking semiotics to the discipline of design, all referring to the contribution of a prominent personality (Morris, Barthes and Floch) and all representative of different ways of conceiving processes of signification, in general, and their production by objects, in particular. In the pages that follow, we will describe some of the areas of design study that have been covered since Floch, looking at the thematic explorations and theoretical reflections that have characterised the last twenty-five years or so of semiotic research on the subject. With no claim to exhaustiveness and completeness, but with the sole intention of synthetically reconstructing a basic bibliography common to the two disciplines, we will try to outline what research is currently underway and the possible lines of future development. Without excluding the contribution that semiotic studies pertaining to other geographical areas, such as France (Floch himself belonged there), have made to design, we will limit ourselves to a reconnaissance of Italian semiotic research, for the sole reason that it stems from the need to set more or less clear-cut boundaries to an objective that would otherwise be too ambitious for this conclusion. If a history of the links between design and semiotics has any meaning, it is that of enabling the project of what is yet to come.