Semiotic Consulting and the Development of Future Societies

A presentation at the Ülemiste City Future Forum in Tallinn on 11 May 2023, delivered as Founder of Semiozic OÜ alongside the doctoral research. The talk introduced Semiozic’s service architecture in three layers:

• Common services: brand identity, representation of cultural codes, cultural market entry, product and packaging design, user engagement, narrative architecture of artistic texts.
• Specialised services: user perception and environmental contextualisation (affordances and scaffolding modelling), cultural-identity audits, organisational-value alignment across stakeholders, urban planning that includes ecological meaning-making and non-human semiosis.
• The underlying apparatus: de-sign as a navigational process distinct from problem-solving; the distinction between de-sign outcomes (qualities) and de-sign deliverables (tangible objects); and the four semiotic components (resources, competence, affordances, scaffolding) as the working diagnostic.

The talk used John Hartley’s four-model account of creative industries (Creative Clusters, Creative Services, Creative Citizens, Creative Cities) to position where each kind of consulting engagement sits in a city’s semiotic ecology. It closed with a four-step process that has since become Semiozic’s intake pattern: initial interview, identification of the object to analyse, specification of design outcomes and deliverables, then research, modelling, and findings delivered to stakeholders.