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Fig. 3.2: Designs in the meeting of material and ideal structures

For this reason, structures of meaning are not stable; nor are they rigidly determined. There is always more that can be known, and knowing may unsettle our present patterns of being and knowing.

And there is always more that can be imagined, and this imagining may prompt us to change our patterns of knowing and being. More of the morphology of being and knowing is always discoverable; more is always achievable, by translating the imaginable into practice. These may be small designs in everyday personal life, or larger designs in and for society and history.

Whatever the scale, the ontology of design is the same, in the play of ideal and material structures of meaning. In every act of meaning, no matter how mundane, we interweave patterns in being with patterns in knowing; we take meanings-in and transform them into meanings-for.

We have available to us an infinity of patterns in being and knowing, and an infinity of knowable and imaginable. As a consequence, our position in time and space – the configuration material and ideal resources available for meaning – is not only patterned in conventional and predictable ways. It is also, always, circumstantially unique.

This is how, when we mean, we cast the timbre of our voice, the image of our mindsight, the nuances of our personality, and the expression of our identity grounded in history and experience. Designing meaning is always a process of remaking the world, always new in its specificity but nevertheless always a recasting of meaning from a historically available residue of meaning resources.

What is left is a world redesigned, ideally and, or, materially.

Sixto Diaz Rodriguez sings:¹⁴¹

And you claim you got something going

Something you call unique …

And you assume you got something to offer

Secrets shiny and new

But how much of you is repetition?

New, some. Repetition, some. Existentially, as agents of meaning, we feel there is something new to everything we mean, and that is true, not just because it is true for me in the moment, but because it is always new for all time. Never has quite this meaning been meant before. And there is repetition, as we draw on historically developed and socially available resources for meaning.

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¹⁴¹ https://genius.com/Rodriguez-crucify-your-mind-lyrics

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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. 301–303. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459645

Design §MS3.2