Abstract

Available from UMI in association with The British Library. ;This thesis is elaborated from the point of view of a third world design educator and practitioner. It tries to establish connections between design practice and signification through a critical assessment of several influential theories of meaning: Peirce's, Saussure's, Hjelmslev's, Derrida's, Lacan's, and Kristeva's. It also reviews and criticizes recent writing on the rhetoric of designing in relation to the design process and problem-solving strategies. ;The key, interdependent dimensions of the process of signification, which underly design and other practices of meaning, are then identified. These are: the physiological dimension of sensorial discriminations, through which the subject apprehends signifiers; the historical dimension of ideological categorizations, through which the subject proposes signifieds; the mediative dimension of analogical relations, through which sense is oriented; and the transformative dimension of syntactic operations, through which the subject interacts with and changes representations. ;I then discuss the role of the sociocultural context in determining choices we make along those dimensions. I argue for a third world design practice geared towards dialogue, intertextual awareness and liberating social productions. I address Paulo's Freires pedagogic methods and refer them to the teaching of design in my university in Brazil, where design has been recently integrated with several other more traditional subjects related to social communication. Arguments on cultural dependency are also examined, in connection with accounts about the teaching of design in the USA and in Brazil. I argue that a semiotically and politically informed, as well as dialogically oriented designing, will make it possible for Brazilian educators and practitioners to become less dependent on ready-made models and solutions, and their productions more sensitive and relevant to the different material realities of our diverse Brazilian sociocultural formations