86
Design and Methodology
them, and from which cultural contexts they arose. They should also tell us something about the users and their ways of life, about real or supposed memberships in social groups, about their values. First, the designer must understand these languages; then, he must be able to teach the objects to speak. Once we understand this, we can recognize the respective shapes of lives in the shapes of objects (Bauer-Wabnegg 1997).
A Short History of Semiotics Semiotics itself goes back to antiquity. This concept was used in ancient Greece in the field of medicine. There, it designated the branch in which the diagnosis and prognosis of diseases was performed through signs. In antiquity a urine sample to be analyzed was called a signum – a sign. Plato presented a number of semiotic discourses, and the distinctions between the following words can be traced back to him: sign (semeion), meaning of the sign (semainómenon), and object.
He was concerned with establishing the relationships between the sign, its meaning, and the thing it designated. This threefold relation was largely forgotten until Charles Sanders Peirce picked it up again in the nineteenth century. Aristotle used various semiotic concepts, such as the science of signs, theory of signs, art of signs (semeiotiké), and sign (sema or semeion). He proceeded from Plato’s discourses and developed a theory of phonetic and written signs, whose essence resided in the fact that with signs “something stands for
something else” (aliquid stat pro aliquo). In the nineteenth century semiotics underwent further development at the medical faculties of European universities. Following up on the ancient Greeks, a medical science of signs (Reimers 1983) was developed. It pursued a holistic approach, evaluating a past lifetime according to anamnestic signs (anamnesis = recall to memory, prehistory of an acute illness), observing the present condition according to diagnostic signs (diagnosis = discern), and put-