The Application and Trends of semiotics in design
Authors: Hongqing Gu , Fang Xiaoling 
Published: June 2024

Semiotics is the study of symbol systems, first proposed at the beginning of this century by the Swiss linguist Saussure, the American philosopher and founder of the philosophy of pragmatism Pierce. Semiotics is the study of the theory of symbols, and its scope of study involves the nature, characteristics, and meaning of the symbols of things, as well as the relationship between symbols and human beings. Design is a discipline closely related to "meaning", so the theory of semiotics is bound to have a strong guiding effect on design.Objectives This paper mainly researches the application of Semiotics in design by answering the following three questions: (1) Which countries and institutions are the application subjects of Semiotics in design? (2) What are the hotspot research topics of Semiotics in design? What are the future frontier trends? (3) What are the topics and paradigms of Semiotics in design high-impact literature research?Methods This paper uses the methods of bibliometrics and information visualization. To obtain more rigorous and comprehensive data indicators, VOS viewer and Cite Space (two pieces of bibliometric visualization software) were used to draw a map of scientific knowledge such as cooperative countries co-occurrence network, keywords co-occurrence clustering network and reference co-citation clustering network so as to conduct an empirical analysis on the retrieved data. In this paper, the Web of Science database is selected to retrieve the journal and paper data related to Design semiotics. In order to ensure the authority and research value of literature data, only SCI, SSCI and A&HCI were selected as the search source, with (Topic= (" semiotics ") AND Title= ("design")) as the search criteria and an unlimited time span. Finally, 407 retrieved papers published from 2000 to 2023 were exported as TXT files in the format of "fully recorded and cited references" to generate a visual knowledge map for quantitative analysis.Results (1) The output of papers related to design semiotics is generally on the rise, with the main output countries are China, Brazil, the United States, the United Kingdom, Italy, and Australia. Among them, China has the largest share of relevant research volume, indicating that China attaches great importance to research in this field and has a wide range of application areas. In addition, Research related to design semiotics is distributed, i.e. many schools and organizations are doing related research, but there are no very prominent institutions yet. (2) Nowadays, the research hotspots of Design semiotics include Computer Science, Engineering, Education Educational Research, Social Sciences, Business Economics, etc., which are mainly applied to "Provide a semiotic methodology primarily for problem solving", thus demonstrating its theoretical value. We can see that the combination of design semiotics with other approaches mainly involves sensory experience and cognitive science, user interface design, affective design and psychology, making design semiotics an interdisciplinary property.(3) At present, a bulk of influential and highly-cited literature on Design semiotics has been generated. For example, some literature has examined Gender and design cultures in information and communication technologies. Some literature has examined the Semiotic Approach to Information Systems Design. They constitute the classic cases and knowledge base of the application of Design semiotics and provide a research basis for the subsequent application of Design semiotics.