Design
MEANING
through
information

The sign

THE SIGN

Around 1900, Ferdinand de Saussure imagined the encounter between two formless nebulae: thought and sound. Their encounter engenders the necessity to unite and divide: contours of forms start emerging, ending up in
signs

.

The system

SYSTEM

The attraction between thought and sound creates a union: the sign. An idea is fixed in a sound and a sound becomes the sign of an idea. In-forming the amorphous, by coupling and delimiting signs, creates the articulation of an expression and a content. Resulting in a
system of signs :

language, allowing a society to communicate.

Le social

THE SOCIAL

Semiosis is the place where the junction between an idea and a sound, a sign, encounters the junctions of another individual. The multiplicity of these encounters requires a
social

system of signes.

Semiosis

SEMIOSIS

Around 1900, Charles S. Peirce combines two concepts in conceiving semiosis. On the one hand, the representation as a relationship between a sign and the object to which the sign refers. On the other hand, an interpretant as the logical equivalence of the representational relationship. In combining the two,
representation and interpretation

, a triangle emerges. Semiosis is the encounter between three elements.

Process

PROCESS

Every semiosis impels a new semiosis. The interpretant takes the place of the representation. And in turn, it finds a new interpretant in establishing a new triangular encounter. The attraction between interpretants, through a representation, thus leads to an
endless process

. A kind of inner dialogue, driven by an inferential logic of reasoning, due to the mechanics of semiosis.

Thinking

THINKING

Semiosis is about the vague process of inferential logic, caused by the encounters between interpretants, in changing the
understanding

of man.

Information

INFORMATION

During the 2nd World War, Claude E. Shannon invented the possibility of digitally manipulating information. This allows us to better target ads on the Web. Firms like Google and Facebook benefit from this in accumulating their capital. But the algorithm for calculating information is limited to one unit with a minimal meaning:
the bit

. This bit of information, as Shannon states, "says nothing about the value or importance of the information".

Purpose

PURPOSE

Quite the opposite. Although information processing (or so-called "intelligence") is presented mainly as a progress. So Shannon points out that it forces humanity "to adapt to a world in which its mental powers are somehow
devalued

". Umberto Eco says the same in other words when stating that in the virtual world of information, we risk "losing any idea of purpose and of action".

Desire

DESIRE

While humanity is busy wandering around in an
excess of information

, it loses all trace of what it wants as a subject. Without the aegis of meaning, information lacks the meaning of what man feels.

Semiosis

MEANING

Semiosis embodies the objective of fully regaining the dynamics of meaning. Thought, seized by a
a logic around a sign

that signifies. As a social system or as an individual process. Semiosis makes sense cogent through understanding of meaning.

A.J. Greimas. Master of trust

Mending (con)science and meaning

A semiotic method

Greimas is the founder of a vast method of semantic analysis, which tries to grasp how meaning is produced.

But this method is also effective in counteracting the crisis of values in our modernity. At a time when meaninglessness reigns, it is a matter of re-semantising the meaning of life by inventing new values.

A source of inspiration

This book reconstructs, step by step, Greimas' context and thought, to be extracted from the method. To finally bring out his anthropological stake.

To achieve this, the book is inspired by the setting of modernity, as described by Paul-Laurent Assoun, and in following the moments when Greimas comes up against the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan.

Read an excerpt

Read the article

J. A. Zachman's architecture revisited

Conceiving the informational enterprise

Enterprise architecture

Zachman has invented an architectural framework for the enterprise that draws on an old rhetorical process.

His architectural framework injects meaning into the conception of today's informational enterprise.

The informational enterprise

A first essay in honour of John A. Zachman on an institute that is increasingly becoming part of our world.

Making sense of Big Data should be aligned with the business, its people and its customers.

Business Canvas Model

How does meaning come into place
in conceiving a business ?

Burn-out

The carbonisation of the world of work

Transhumanism

Man augmented by instrumentality
aspires to be God …

Design MEANINGthrough information