This workshop started off with a warm up game of Pictionary to allow us to be eased into the topic of Semiotics and the science of signs.
Ian discussed the history of Semiology, a meta science that is the study of signs and how we view them. We discussed how signs are one of the most vital ways of modern day communication. Historically we know they’ve been around for thousands of years and have played a part in communication before modern language came along.
In class we discussed the IBM ‘Think’ poster and analysed it using semiology. Within this visual we can see the eye is an image of an eye that should represent the letter ‘I’, the bumble bee represents ‘B’ and the M in the image is self explanatory. This design may be simple but the complex use of semiotics that has been thought about to execute the poster design is far from simple.
We found out that Charles Sanders Peirce came up with an idea of semiotics and had his theory that signs could be explained with three things. An icon, an index and a symbol. Following on from Peirce we learnt about Ferdinand de Saussure who had a different theory on signs. He believed that signs could be split into two, a ‘signifier’ and the ‘signified’. This idea was that the idea was signified and this approach was more about his interest for structure in signs and the relationships between sound image and the signified.
Also, we had a look into Denotation and Connotation for example the word ‘eagle’ denotes a bird but one could connotate an Eagle with the USA.
Lastly we disccused a book called Myth by Roland Barthes. We discussed how do things have meaning and how did meaning appear with the other things.
