Week 4 reflection - abstraction and semiotics

This topic is prevalent in many visual communication and communication modules. I have come across this concept quite often in many NM modules I take in NUS. This actually make things much more complex as different people have different experiences and different interpretation of different objects. One very interesting concept is actually derived from hand gestures. Although hand gestures indicates certain meaning towards it, depending on the differences in culture, it might mean very different things. For example, the ok hand sign:

It is commonly used in many parts of the world as acknowledgement, but in certain countries it is a offensive sign. Different cultures agreed upon different set of meanings for different hand gestures which is important for us to study sigmatics or signs.

Another interesting concept derives from the toilet sign.

The toilet sign actually resembles male and female person while at the same time it is actually a symbol that is universally accepted to indicate male and female toilet.

Taking from the example in the lecture:










Although each of the sign indicates that it is either indicative, imperative and suggestive, the signs might mean different things to different cultures. For example the suggestive picture does not make any explicit indication that smoking is actually bad for lungs, it only indicates a connection with lung health which might not be understandable by certain individuals who lack education and might not even know in the first place that smoking is bad for them and their lung health.