How Meaning Can Inform Fashion Design – The Semantic Turn

Abstract

Relevance of MeaningOn a BBQ-party, last summer a friend of mine approached me with the question: "Are you Major Tom?" My mother hated blue jeans and so I did not get one when I was a child. For my friend my silver jacket induced his question. My mother associated blue jeans with belonging to the worker class in society. These are just two examples that clothes have meaning not only for the people wearing them. Not only fashioned textiles have meaning but also ordinary clothes without any kind of recognizable label or alike. "The fundamental insight of human-centered design is that people never respond to what things are but act according to what they mean to them" [1]. With his book "The semantic turn; A new foundation for design", Krippendorff [2] changed design thinking. This thinking and understanding of meaning is applicable in general for the artificial. Thereby "artifacts make possible something that would not come about naturally " [3]. Artifacts are all human creations weather tangible like clothes or intangible like brands or images. This thinking of design put meaning in its center; "Meaning is the only reality that matters" [1]. The meaning of clothes transcends all areas of the world. It is not limited to artifacts. However here artifacts are in the focus. Meaning and Artificiality in DesignIn postmodern design-thinking meaning is not a characteristic of a thing or an entity. Meaning emerges through a process of recursive operations including interaction and indicating. Löbler and Wloka have shown how meaning emerges when recursive operations are working [4,5]; Following Wittgenstein [6], they found that words either refer to other words or to practices. These references are loops either between words or between practices and words. Think a moment about the word "catwalk". We know that there are never real cats on a catwalk. Originally, catwalks were minor walkways on ships or backstage in theaters. When one is confronted with this word the first time, one has no idea of its meaning. To understand it meaning the word is connected either to other word (explanations) or to the "reality". However, to really understand the term one has to see and probably experience what happens with and on a catwalk (connecting the word to a practice).