SPOKEN THOUGHT · APPLYING · BRIDGING · COMPLETED
Applying: teaching a discipline so students can use it, not just study it.
Bridging: translating semiotic theory across very different departments and audiences.
The clearest test of whether a theory is genuinely usable is whether it can be taught to someone who has never met it. Across 2023 and 2024 I taught in three different departments at two universities, each time to students who were not semioticians, and each time with the same aim: not to have them admire the framework, but to leave able to use it.
Three teaching engagements, distinct in audience and register.
Design Thinking and Applied Semiotics (University of Tartu, Department of Semiotics, 2024). The course I designed and led as lecturer: a 3-ECTS course that uses Tartu itself as a creative city in which to apply semiotics to design thinking and strategic planning. It requires no prior background in semiotics or design, and runs on the four semiotic components (resources, affordances, competence, scaffolding) as a working apparatus. Students move from modelling the user and the environment, through affordances and tones, the degrees of nature, and designer-artefact-user systems, to a final design deliverable built for an identified stakeholder, including a seminar sitting in with potential clients about semiotic consulting. The course teaches the same distinction the research turns on: the linear, deliberate act that aims at a target, and the non-linear intentionality through which unexpected outcomes emerge. Co-taught with Silver Rattasepp.
Entrepreneurial Opportunity: How to Model “Meaning” (University of Tartu, Department of Finance, 2024). A guest lecture inside the Modern Financial Management course, carrying the semiotic apparatus into a business-school setting. The lecture, on strategic performance and semiotics, showed how semiotics can be used within an organisation’s structure to communicate projects and strategies through a clear translation process, factoring in both the qualitative and quantitative aspects that orient organisational decisions. It treated sustainability not as a fixed target but as a dynamic process of an organisation’s culture and its external connections, and it drew directly on the doctoral research to offer actionable methods for engaging the semiotic components of an organisation.
The Role of Semiotics in Inner Speech Studies (Tallinn University, Department of Linguistics, 2023). A guest lecture connected to the inner-speech research collaboration, built around the published research and the role semiotics plays in reading inner speech, brought to a linguistics audience.
Teaching is where the apparatus has to survive contact with people who owe it no loyalty. The three engagements span a semiotics department, a finance department, and a linguistics department, which is itself a small proof of the transdisciplinary claim: the same toolbox holds whether the room is full of semioticians, future financiers, or linguists. The Design Thinking course is the fullest expression, because it does not lecture about applied semiotics, it makes students produce a design deliverable and defend it to a stakeholder, which is the discipline doing rather than describing.
University of Tartu, Department of Semiotics, 2024 (lecturer)
University of Tartu, Department of Finance, 2024 (guest lecturer)
Tallinn University, Department of Linguistics, 2023 (guest lecturer)
Forthcoming: De-signing Techno-Living Spaces, an elective course developed for the Estonian Academy of Arts, Faculty of Architecture (2026/2027)
See the Academic Foundation page for the teaching record in list form
University of Tartu & Tallinn University · 2023–2024