2.3  Thomistic, Semio-ethic Design: A New Semiotics

 

This thomistic, semiotic-design project is nevertheless a very radical departure from design conceived by a design profession that eschews criticality (Dilnot, 2008) when enslaved either by the totalizing etsi Deus non daretur of the secular, neoliberal market (Milbank 2006) or a cultural atheism, and, is bound to be rejected as pointless and unintelligible a design project by those within the profession – “How can we sell this? And who will want to buy such designs? There’s no market for this today!” To design orthodoxy, it would be curious heresy. Equally unpalatable for some in the academic design research community is the fact that metaphysical concepts, besides ethical ideas, now inform the articulation of what design is and what designers are and do.  No doubt Nigel Cross (2006) has welcomed the articulation of a ‘science of design’ that is rigorous but distinguished from a “design science” that is in his view corrupted by positivist or scientistic cultures of thought, and so one might think – and rightly so – this would imply an inclusive design research strategy that draws on disciplinary contributions outside of design, including (thomistic) metaphysics; still, his own positing of a category of thinking called “designerly ways of knowing” (ibid.) to be researched by designers and designers only in fact shuns disciplinary contributions outside of design, and so leads, wrong-headedly in my opinion, to an exclusive and specialized research field for designers only (Chua, forthcoming 2014).  Such semiotic designers are therefore a curious category at the cutting-edge, even if fully legitimate and anticipated by Gunther Kress’ (2000:15) argument for a “Design” that shapes words and signs and his plea on behalf of a new semiotics that acknowledges that signs are not merely used but Designed (Chua, 2013c).

 

Yet this design thinking is what must make up the new semiotics. Meaning, and more importantly (at this point pushing the perimeters in semiotics once more) I suggest that the metaphysically informed design of beings is recognizably also as an instantiation of the semio-ethical stance, although it is clearly beyond what Petrilli and Ponzio have thus far imagined semio-ethics to look like.  For Petrilli and Ponzio, semio-ethics’ “special vocation is to evidence sign networks where it seemed there were none” (Petrilli & Ponzio, 2010: 162) This includes those signs that are of the gifted in critical opposition to the merely exchangeable (Petrilli & Ponzio, 2001: 37).  In this respect, our designerly semiosic remembrance through beings who have existence (habens esse) recalls the reality of God’s intimate presence that had already been freely given by the sheer fact of our existence, and from the fact that God, who is infinite Being, needs nothing else for his own perfection, and hence gives existence freely without need for something else in exchange.

 

With Petrilli and Ponzio (2001), we could hence say that while “in today’s world the logic of production and the rules that govern the market allowing all to be exchanged and commodified threaten to render humanity ever more insensible [and] humans increasingly pay little or no attention to the signs of all that which cannot be measured or purchased but are received as a gift,” this radically critical design thinking which finds its expression as a semio-ethical design project retrieves “those signs of life that today we cannot or do not wish to read, or those signs that we do not know how to read, [so that they] may recover one day their importance and relevance for humanity.” (pp. 36-37)  Yet, going beyond what Petrilli and Ponzio have said, we must now say and invite them to say with us that: semio-ethics incorporates into itself such a radical thomistic design thinking which designs the meaning of all beings without remainder into signs pointing anew at God’s gifting, intimate presence.