I thoroughly enjoyed the 3 short Lupton-Miller essays – Counting Sheep, Modern Hieroglyphs and Language of Dreams. Language, by Google’s definition, is “the method of human communication, either spoken or written, consisting of the use of words in a structured and conventional way”. The research explored in these 3 essays, along with some of Saussure’s theory, implies that the development and use of language is dependent on man arbitrary factors as well as societal ones. I believe that communication is simply the transfer of information, or the transmission of a message, between 2 or more people. The how of communication can vary. Even animals communicate with one another in their own ways, but it is not the same as language.

Language, on the other hand, is a system of communication that relies on both verbal and non-verbal codes to relay information. Counting Sheep showed how archaic numbering systems have a relationship with design and symbols. The use of the abacus and its physical design directly resulted in the use of the symbol 0 to stand for the gap between number places. This already established language influenced a design.

Different languages have different systems of this dynamic between the verbal and the non-verbal. My favorite example of this dynamic is in Modern Hieroglyphs and Language of Dreams. It was interesting to see the symbols we’ve become so familiar with being used with such ease in conventional writing, however the history of its relationship with design was fascinating. Stylistic principles of reduction, consistency, and simplicity, are used in a system that is meant to be universal. It reminded me a lot of principles used in the making of Helvetica in which simplicity and uniformity were emphasized to construct a “universal’ type face. Language of Dreams breaks down this universal language and starts to point out its limitations in the use of specific language. We begin to explore the difference between pictographs, in which the picture is meant to have a literary translation, and ideographs, in which the symbols used are meant to communicate a secondary, or even tertiary idea. I hadn’t even thought about how the car rental symbol could be seen as “car dreams of key” but that is the relation that symbols have to language and how language differs from communication.

The role that language plays in design is its use of both verbal and non-verbal codes. Designers are always working with non-verbal codes. Color, shape, icons, lines, etc.; these all communicate specific ideas based on our understanding of non-verbal language. Our understanding even changes as we start to try and communicate in other languages that might have different non-verbal associations. To put it simply, it is a tool. Language is a tool that helps us communicate the ideas we have with others. It is fascinating however how the correlation we have with said ideas can be rather arbitrary in their formation. A lot of that depends on the histories of our respective languages. I guess that arbitrary origination allows us to ask ourselves how we can create non-verbal codes and associations in the future with our designs.