Design: the rhetorical work of shaping the semiotic world

The chapter offers a distinctive perspective on the world of meaning: namely that of ‘design as semiotic work,’ which underlies all and every action of making meaning. It assumes that the work of design is ceaseless, changing the world in the course of that work. We start with a world which on the one hand is already fully designed, and which, on the other hand, is constantly re-designed in and by our semiotic actions, in relation to constantly changing social requirements. The designed world of semiotic resources furnishes us with both the material and the immaterial semiotic resources needed to deal with the semiotic demands of the social world day to day. In our actions, in redesign and in the production of designs, we constantly transform both kinds of resources: the material resources – the modes – and the non-material resources, which emerge in the materiality of modes.