Harrell Reading (Morphic Semiotics)

Today’s reading on Morphic Semiotics felt very abstract at some points. There was a lot of terminology that I wasn’t able to understand the definitions of till later (and even know my understanding of what semiotics is is vague). I really liked the example of Brawn at the Bazaar and how their experience translates to a design online as it helped me understand the concept of semiotic spaces and semiotic morphisms a little better. Another part of the reading I thought was informative was the categorization of the three different categories of signs: icons, indexes, and symbols. Indexes were a very fascinating category of signs because they thing being represented is connected to the object physically/casually. Even though this type of sign is described as “directly connected to the object” it feels less effective than the third category of symbol, where the connection between the sign and object is described as arbitrary social conventions such as speech and language. I think this shows that signs are incredibly dependent on context for their meanings, because I find what is described to be “arbitray social convention” as a simpler and more clear way to represent the meaning than certain representations from the icon and index category

Allman Reading (Gestalt Psychology)

The website about Gestalt Psychology was very helpful in defining the principles that explain how we percieve the world around us. I really like how direct they were in explaining the different principles and the use of an example for each of them (very easy to parse). I think the concept that was most interesting to me was the Law of Closure because it reminds me of how we also parse words and how often times we fill in gaps for missing words because we are so used to certain words in a context (i.e. filling missing articles or prepositions).