Here in the Northern Hemisphere, springtime is in full swing. Toads are trilling in the marsh, rambunctious blooms are signaling their juiciness to pollinators, beehives are abuzz with workers doing elaborate wiggles to relay the location of the sweetest nectar, and baby gulls will soon be pecking at the red spots on their parents’ beaks. These are just a few examples of information being shared and actions being effected in nature through the medium of signs. Even if human forms of communication have some unique characteristics, the ability to read and interpret the world through signs is clearly much more universal–indeed, as semiotician Wendy Wheeler writes, there is a growing recognition that the inextricable “ecological intertwining of flesh, sign, and world” is in fact the fundamental basis of all life (Wheeler 4). According to Wheeler, the laws of thermodynamics apply equally to energy and information because any living thing is the result of the coordination of the two phenomena. Life is enabled by the “complex flows of sign relations within and across bodies” and species (Wheeler 11). Any species’ ability to interpret and act on signs in its environment is key to its long-term success and survival.
This post asks how the design of the human environment in the 21st century can build on the biosemiotic scaffolding of both human and nonhuman species. Recognizing that our bodies are born to interface with nature, how can we use what we know about that process now to embed new, ecologically relevant sign systems into the environments we create? What kind of ecological information should these signs convey? How can we build on existing signifiers to create a universally applicable language, including one potentially legible to nonhumans? Ultimately, how can biosemiotics inform urban design for a more ecologically conscious society? These are just a few of the questions we will pose and discuss in what follows.
The Ecoempathy Project 