ql-align-center">design ⇔ designing ⇔ designed

Design (patterns): Patterns of meaning in found objects (human and natural) and lived experience. There are first-order patterns, “rules” of meaning in the designs of found meaning-objects that can be applied by way of partial replication.

Designing (actions): The mental and physical work of meaning in the amalgam of ideas and materialized action (praxis). We can mean an infinity of things, even though our field of vision is also constrained by the here-ness and now-ness of experience. We can develop an account of this selection in terms of our identities, and our identities in terms of the unique history of living experience in each of us. Then, our forms of meaning or the mental and material tools we use to represent and communicate our meaning, bending our meaning in ways that are characteristic of these forms (text, image, space, object, body, sound, and speech). We bend our meanings according to the affordances of form, and the forms of our meanings bend us. An analysis of the meaning functions across different modes provides an account of the patterns in the bending, these second-order patterns.

Designed (artifacts): Something made, a trace of the thinking and bodily effort put into meaning. Now we are back to first-order meanings (design), but with traces of second-order meanings (designing). We can track the genealogy of this artifact of meaning back to the design patterns found in the world and lived in experience. We can track the bending of these patterns in the process of designing, providing an account of selection from an infinity of meaning options and the affordances of meaning forms. In parsing a designed artifact we have a theory that accounts both for congruence (the patterns replicated), and incongruence (the impossibility of faithful replication, and the patterns of divergence).

Lo, the world has been redesigned. A completely new meaning has been made, albeit within the social and material conditions of meanability. This can now return to the world as a template for renewed meaning. These are the wellsprings of personal voice, creativity, and human identities. Meanings are both conventional (using available designs for meaning) and inventive (the process of designing). As a consequence, no two designs of meaning are ever quite the same.

The world meant is both the world repeated and the world transformed. Now we have a theory that traces change as well as continuity. Then we can ask, what are the patterns in the transformation?

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Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. 2020. Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 68-71. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459645

Design §MS0.4.1