SPOKEN THOUGHT · APPLYING · BRIDGING · COMPLETED

Industry & Applied Conference Presentations

Spoken thought

Questions it asks

Applying: translating the apparatus into something a practitioner or executive can use.

Bridging: how meaning travels between academic and industry semiospheres.

Stage

Completed

Years

2022–2025

Place

Applied & industry venues

Role

Presenter

The encounter

A different translation problem

Bringing a semiotic apparatus to an industry room is a different translation problem from bringing it to an academic one. The audience reads differently, asks different questions, and rewards different kinds of precision. Where academic conferences shape the research by testing its arguments against the discipline, industry and applied venues shape the consulting practice by testing whether the apparatus is legible and useful to people whose vocabulary is not semiotic. Across these years I presented three substantial industry-facing talks alongside the academic work, each one a different angle on the same question: what can semiotics actually do for a practitioner, an executive, or a brand?

What was made

Method, reading, application

The three talks form a progression from method to reading to application.

Method. Semiotic Consulting and the Development of Future Societies (Ülemiste City Future Forum, Tallinn, 11 May 2023), the first public articulation of Semiozic OÜ’s service architecture and its four-step intake process. The deck remains in active use.
Reading. AI and the (human) Semiosphere (Technosemiotics, online, 10 July 2023), which read AI not as a technology beat but as a cultural condition: a clash between four cultural-industrial models.
Application. A commutation analysis of a bilingual product name at Semiofest 2025, the international festival of applied semiotics, bringing the apparatus down to the scale of one object on the table.

A fourth talk, an invited guest presentation at a Technosemiotics workshop on the relevance of semiotics for AI (summer 2022), preceded these three; its details are still being confirmed.

Each of the three has its own entry as a featured case study: Ülemiste, AI and the (human) Semiosphere, and A Commutation of LUST.

What it shows

The apparatus carries across registers

The three talks together demonstrate that the apparatus carries across the registers a consulting practice actually needs to move through: setting out the method, reading a domain through it, and using it to analyse a single object on the table. The Semiofest reception confirmed that the apparatus reads to commercial semioticians; the Ülemiste reception confirmed that it reads to business and innovation audiences; the Technosemiotics reception confirmed that it reads to a hybrid audience interested in technology’s cultural shape. This entry is the hub that holds the body of industry-facing work together.

Venues: Ülemiste City Future Forum (Tallinn, 2023); Technosemiotics (online, 2023; workshop, 2022); Semiofest 2025
Featured case studies with their own entries: AI and the (human) Semiosphere, Ülemiste, and A Commutation of LUST
The Semiofest talk is published on a minimal-disclosure basis: the producing company is anonymised and no product imagery is shown
All presented as the work of Semiozic OÜ, in dialogue with the doctoral research at the University of Tartu

Applied & industry venues · Semiozic OÜ