Invitation to join Semiofest
For those who haven’t yet peeped through the keyhole that is commercial semiotics, there is a biannual conference that features the state-of-the-art of the industry. Commercial semiotics since its relatively recent inception has focused on culture; but that is changing quickly. Beginning with the 2024 Semiofest gathering in Porto, biosemiotics has played front and center. Many commercial semioticians, including the biggest firms, think it is one of the most exciting developments in the field in a long time.
Long story short: there is an opportunity for commercial biosemiotics. What will it look like? What are the paths to development? How will we do so ethically, shaping companies’ unsustainable practices and give them something that selects wider for planetary health rather than just for the next quarter’s report or the immediate return for their investors? How do we build thousand year companies, not through domination and control, but through creating renewable ecologies of sourcing, selling, and maintenance design?
This May 20-22 in Warsaw, we’ll have both a pre-program special workshop, and a keynote on biosemiotics. We would love for more biosemioticians to start working in commercial semiotics, and help develop this emerging field together. This field of applied biosemiotics challenges to strengthen our ethics while creating value in a commercial system that is being rehauled in real time. There is opportunity here. Semiofest is where the premier semioticians working non-academically gather every two years. Consider this your invitation.
From Molecules to Meaning: How Biosemiotics insight can help us innovate for our changing world
Emanuela Bove, Yogi Hendlin, Noël Theodosiou,
Since its development, applied semiotics has contributed significantly to the commercial domain. It provides an understanding of meaning behind communication and contexts that cannot be achieved with traditional market research methods alone. It takes cold data and makes it warm, connecting dots between what is observable and what is understood. However, current practices of applied semiotics don’t fully integrate all levels of the human experience.
Biosemiotics expands semiotics analysis to include the biological sign systems which underpin and sometimes unconsciously influence the others. It considers how humans interpret meaning through bodily, sensory and ecological cues, as well as cultural ones.
Biosemiotics focuses on the ways living things sense and respond to their environment, even before language or conscious thought. It connects biology with the study of signs and meaning. When applied in practice, this approach has the power to deliver insights that can drive a new level of innovation across sectors, organizations, both corporate and not-for-profit.
In work done to date, biosemiotics insights have suggested how organizations can:
Design products and services that better address human needs holistically
Better anticipate responses to experiences by focusing on the instinctual aspects of the human animal
Achieve greater alignment between sustainability efforts and commercial efforts
This workshop is designed to help participants enrich their current practice, thickening the levels of meaning-making in semiotic analysis, and grounding it closer to how our species experiences and interprets the world.
What you will learn?
• Understand the difference between semiotics and biosemiotics in practical applications
• Recognize multi-scale sign systems: molecular -> cellular -> sensory -> symbolic
• Recognize one’s own body as interpretative instrument
Select Wider: Biosemiotics and the Future of Sense-Making
Yogi Hale Hendlin
How might commercial semiotics learn to see and sense the world according to our animal bodies and ecological evolutionary psychology?
This keynote proposes that ‘selecting wider’ begins with a figure-ground shift: by attending to what is usually treated as background, meaning takes on new dimensions, the invisible becomes salient, and dominant objects recede into context. Biosemiotics, reconnects aesthetics to ethics and expands the semiotic toolkit, reframing commercial semiotics as an ecological practice – one that aligns market meaning with embodied perception, evolutionary attunements, and more-than-human worlds.