More than Meets the Eye: A Critical Semiotic Analysis of Landscape Design Visualizations

• Main Author: Raaphorst, Kevin
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses 01-01-2019
• Subjects: Architects; Audiences; Cartography; Climate Change; Collaboration; Defense; Designers; Epistemology; Floods; Inventory; Knowledge; Landscape architecture; Philosophy; Planning; Political power; Research methodology; Scale models; Semiotics; Stakeholders; Visualization
• ISBN: 9798708787040

This thesis investigates the communicative qualities of visual landscape design representations in a participatory context. The need for this thesis research originated from the observation that landscape planning and design projects, especially those related to climate change adaptation, require multifunctional solutions. This multifunctionality, combined with an increasing level of public participation, leads to the inclusion of a variety of experts, stakeholders and local communities. Visual representations are the primary means of communication between designers, planners, and participants during such participatory processes yet little critical research has been undertaken on how different forms of visual design communication work or what their socio-political implications are for the progress and outcomes of participatory planning and design processes. The research objective of this thesis was to contribute to a more conscious use of visual design representations in participatory landscape planning and design processes by studying the visual communication that occurs between designers, experts and stakeholders as meaning-making processes. Identifying the influence of these meaning-making processes on the progress and outcome of participatory planning and design projects enables more effective and transparent communication between project stakeholders. The research objective identified in this thesis translates into the following research question: What meaning-making processes are visual landscape design representations part of, and how do these processes shape the progress and outcomes of participatory landscape planning and design projects? In this thesis, I focused on the use of visual design representations as a means of communication within participatory planning and design processes of multifunctional flood defence landscapes. The main subjects of inquiry were therefore (1) visual design representations in their many forms and appearances; (2) the meanings that are attributed to or derived from these representations by designers, planners, and project stakeholders; (3) the participatory planning and design processes of multifunctional flood defence landscape projects where these representations are used. To study these subjects, theoretical perspectives on meaning-making and visual research methods were explored and applied, and a critical visual research approach to the study of the meanings of visual landscape design representations in a participatory context was developed. The relation between visual design representations, their production and their interpretation is considered as a process of meaning-making. This process of meaning-making is called semiosis and the study of this process is called semiotics. As meaning-conveying objects, visual design representations and their influence on participatory planning and design processes are conceptualized through a theoretical perspective that is based on the Peircean theory of semiotics. For semioticians, the meaning of the world is mediated by different kinds of signs: sounds, smells, colours, emotions, sentiments, etc. Everything has the potential to be a sign as long as it means something to someone. In Peircean semiotics three components of the sign are distinguished: representamen, object and interpretant. The representamen consists of the perceivable form of a sign, i.e. its physical manifestation as a sound, smell, form, or image. The object consists of the thing that the sign refers to. For example, a flood map (representamen) represents the extent in which an area was or could be flooded (object). The interpretant consists of the interpretation of that object by someone via its representamen. In turn, that interpretation leads to an action or influence a result which is also described as the critical function of a sign. This triadic perspective constitutes the main conceptual framework of the research carried out in this thesis. Visual design representations, as signs that contain a great number of signs within themselves, are studied from four perspectives: their critical functions, their representamen, their interpretation, and their object. Firstly, the outline of a critical visual research approach for studying the influence of landscape design representations on participatory planning and design processes has been presented. This outline based on a literature study shows that concepts of visual and critical social theory (e.g. visual semiotics, simulacra and simulation, and power/knowledge) are useful for critically reflecting on landscape architectural representations. It has also been proposed to study these representations at different stages of meaning-making with different visual methodologies, e.g. iconographical content analysis, social semiotic analysis and visual discourse analysis. These research approaches have the potential to explain issues such as dominant power structures, miscommunication between participants, and visual path-dependencies during landscape design processes. The proposed critical visual research approach was then applied to each of the so-called ‘stages of visual communication’, i.e. image, audiencing or interpretation and production. These stages relate to the aforementioned sign components, i.e. representamen, interpretant and object, respectively. The image stage was studied in terms of its semiotic complexity, the audiencing or interpretation stage was studied through the analysis of interpretive habit, and the production stage was analysed by studying the visual discourse embedded in the image during its production process. The study of visual design representations and the meaning-making processes that they are part of was conducted using an explorative retrospective case study approach. The empirical case study that is representative of the subjects of inquiry, i.e. visual design representations and the participatory context in which they were produced and interpreted was identified in the form of the design processes and representations that were part of the Rebuild by Design (RbD) competition. RbD was a transdisciplinary design competition that took place in the greater metropolitan area of New York after 2012’s hurricane Sandy. The process of visual communication — or visual semiosis — was studied by analysing the images that were produced during these design processes, and by interviewing the audiences and producers of those images. The semiotic complexity of 759 landscape design representations was studied using an analytical framework based on semiotic and iconographic theory. This framework enables a visual content analysis and iconographic interpretation of two projects from Rebuild by Design, i.e. the New Meadowlands and the Living With the Bay projects. This framework also presents a semiotic vocabulary based on four categories, i.e. medium, mode, formulation, and knowledge, with which to ‘read’, discuss and potentially create design representations. These categories enable the assessment of the semiotic complexity of design representations in terms of validity, readability and interactivity. The validity of design ideas relates to the functionality, visual aesthetics, and feasibility of the design, i.e. whether the solutions are suitable for arriving at a multifunctional flood defence landscape; whether these solutions are deemed necessary and implementable; whether they are supported by the process participants. The readability of a design image relates to the extent to which participants can read and understand the content of a design. The interactivity of a design image relates to the medium through which it is presented and the extent to which that medium allows the participants to interact with the content and visualization of the design. What is considered to be valid, readable, and interactive depends on both the interpretive habits of the audience and the producer’s discursive power to influence these habits. The interpretive habits of landscape design representations were studied using an analytical framework for a social semiotic post-foundational discourse analysis (SSPDA). This framework was applied to a partial reconstruction of the sociopolitical context of three Rebuild by Design projects, i.e. the New Meadowlands, the Resist, Delay, Store, Discharge, and the Big-U projects. By analysing the interviews with designers and local stakeholders counter-productive interpretations of landscape designs were uncovered which could easily have been anticipated by the designers at the moment of creation. By recognizing such conflicting interpretive habits during specific phases of the design process, planners and designers are able to better anticipate the productive and counter-productive interpretations of their designs. Consequently, planners and designers can attune their visual representations to their audiences’ interpretive habits or try to influence these habits through the use of the discursive power of their representations. This visual discourse of landscape design representations was studied by conceptualizing landscape design representations as discursive materializations of power and knowledge. The social relations within which the production of representations is embedded and the way that these relations manifest themselves in the communicative qualities of design representations were studied using a visual discourse analysis. The visual discourse analysis of Rebuild by Design uncovered interdependencies between three components of visual discourse: the arrangement of the participatory process, the interactivity of the media being used and the visual rhetoric embedded within the composition and style of the image. A conscious use of these discursive components by planners and designers prevents miscommunication, manages participant expectations and increases the validity of participatory design process outcomes. The answer to the first part of the main research questi