SPOKEN THOUGHT · SURFACING · APPLYING · UPCOMING
Surfacing: how the technologies we live among, and stopped noticing, shape the meaning we make at home.
Applying: handing architecture and design students a semiotic toolbox they can use on any living space.
A doctoral thesis argues its case to other researchers. A course has to make that case usable to the people who will actually act on it. De-signing Techno-Living Spaces is the thesis turned into a semester, developed for the Estonian Academy of Arts and taught in the Faculty of Architecture, where the students are not future semioticians but future architects, interior architects, urban planners, and designers, the people who will go on to shape the living spaces the research is about. The course exists to put the semiotic toolbox into the hands that will build with it.
A 3-ECTS elective course (nine lectures and four seminars across the semester, capped at twenty-four students), designed and taught as sole lecturer. It requires no prior background in semiotics or design. The course is built on the concept of de-sign (after Seif) and the semiotic toolbox developed in the thesis: the umwelt and lifeworld, the four semiotic components (resources, competence, affordances, scaffolding), semiotic ecology, and the notion of milieu drawn from Berque.
Its structure is the course’s central design move: each lecture pairs a domain of living-space technology with a theoretical tool, treating each technology as a way of inhabiting rather than a piece of equipment to be specified. The technologies anchoring the course are smart-home and Internet-of-Things systems, immersive virtual and augmented environments as hyperreal extensions of the home, self-sustainable and off-grid infrastructures (with a focus on Earthships), everyday domestic artefacts and appliances, and the tools and materials of creative and constructive practice.
The work is empirical rather than abstract. Each student selects a real living space they have inhabited or observed, and builds an analysis of it across four homework assignments: mapping it as a designer-artefact-user system, applying the semiotic components to a single technology within it, and tracing how its surrounding milieu participates in the meaning-making of inhabitation. The course ends with an oral presentation in which each student interprets their chosen space and articulates how the technologies within it orient their own meaning-making.
This is the most complete pedagogical translation of the research that exists: the entire apparatus of the thesis, sequenced into a teachable semester and anchored to spaces the students actually live in. It also places the research where it can do the most good. Taught inside an architecture faculty, the course reaches the people who design built environments for a living, and it asks them to treat a smart speaker, an Earthship wall, or a hand tool not as equipment but as a way of inhabiting, a sign relation between a dweller and their world. The course is the clearest evidence that de-sign is not only an argument about living spaces but a method that can be handed to the people who make them.
Estonian Academy of Arts, Faculty of Architecture; elective, open across faculties (primary resonance with architecture, interior architecture, urban planning, and design)
2026/2027 academic year · 3 ECTS · English · face-to-face
Sole lecturer and course designer
Built directly on the doctoral thesis, The De-sign Process of Inhabiting Techno-Living Spaces
Companion to the Teaching record
Estonian Academy of Arts · Faculty of Architecture · 2026/2027