The problem of design as a metalanguage of the information space

Pankratova Aleksandra Vladimirovna PhD in Philosophy Associate professor, Department of Design, National Research University “Moscow Power Engineering Institute” 111250, Russia, Moskovskaya oblast', g. Moscow, ul. Krasnokazarmennaya, 13 S, kab. 605 sashaoscar@mail.ru Other publications by this author

Introduction

Currently, the socio-cultural environment of a modern person is becoming hyperreality, the information space. The term J. Baudrillard's hyperreality in our days has turned out to be not just relevant, but necessary for the description, understanding and research of modern society. Modern culture develops not in a subject environment, but in a meta-environment, a symbolic mythological reality built over the primary subject-spatial environment. Hyperreality is the Internet, mass media, advertising, the content of news feeds, social networks. Practically, modern man spends most of his time online, in hyperreality.

The paradox is that, being, in fact, a metalanguage in relation to the objective world, hyperreality itself actively uses not a language, but a metalanguage for most of its messages. The user is influenced not so much by the text as by the visual image of the hyper-environment, that is, its design.

The purpose of this study is to explicate design as a metalanguage of modern hyperreality.

The relevance of the research is due to the need for cultural understanding of globalization and its consequences for communication. With the movement of communication into the information space, humanity has practically switched to a universal language, which is being built over national languages. But the transition to a metalanguage can be fatal for the culture itself if this language turns out to be more primitive than the languages in which humanity is accustomed to communicate. This process of transition to a metalanguage is actively taking place today, and this study shows that design is currently such a metalanguage.

Theoretical foundations of the study

The study is based on the research of J. Baudrillard, aimed at the study and description of hyperreality ^[1,2]. In addition, the nature of hyperreality was studied by M. McLuhan ^[3]. The study also relies on semiotic research about design. Design as a semiotic phenomenon is considered by W. Eco ^[4], R. Barta ^[5], L. N. Bezmozdina ^[6], E. V. Zherdeva ^[7]. We have also already addressed the study of the design phenomenon, for example, in the works "Design in Modernity: a historical choice in favor of globalization" ^[8], "Design as a cultural phenomenon" ^[9], "Flat design as visualization of flat ontologies" ^[10].

Material and method of research

The research method is a semiotic analysis of the modern design environment. The main research material is modern graphic design, in particular, the so-called flat design, which represents the most common design style at the present time.

Since modern design in this study is explicated as a metalanguage projected onto hyperreality, it can be said that modern hyperreality itself, the information space, is the material of the study. Despite the apparent vastness of the material, hyperreality is quite homogeneous today. The reasons for such homogeneity of the modern information environment lie precisely in the metalanguage chosen today – modern design.

Since 2010 and up to the present, the design of the information space has been dominated by the style of flat design. Flat design assumes the absence of background, volume, bright colors, complex graphics, any decorativeness. Today, design is moving from postmodern diversity to homogeneity, which is observed in the design of all Internet resources, applications, as well as in the subject-spatial environment.

Semiotic analysis of the design environment shows that the main sign that today serves as the basis of communication is a simulacrum sign. Before hyperreality became the main medium of communication, humanity used three main types of signs known from semiotics: iconic signs, index signs and symbol signs. A common feature of all three types of signs is the presence of a referent, signified. The design used signs referring to a certain reality, to a specific meaning. Today, design mainly uses signs without a signified – simulacra. There is no content behind the design messages, the design refers to itself according to the famous formula of M. McLuhan "a means of communication is a message" ^{[3, p. 14]}.

Moreover, today the simulation process has reached the next stage of development, compared to the time when Zh. Baudrillard identified three orders of simulacra ^{[2, p. 12]}: today, fourth-order simulacra are used in design. A simulacrum of the fourth order is a sign, not only the signified, but also the signifier of which tends to zero.

This is the modern flat design. Today, designers are abandoning color, practically abandoning form, turning any image into a scheme. The complex graphics that characterized the design of the 2000s are now being replaced by very generalized conditional schemes, or a complete lack of design. In recent years, all Internet resources have abandoned the background, the colored bars, the underscores denoting a hyperlink. Decorativeness, figurativeness is reduced to zero today.

The missing signifier indicates the absence of the signified, since the meaning of any design idea today is also minimized. Nowadays designers don't use games with cultural codes, reminiscences, language games. Today, the main method of creating a design is references. References are a method in which a designer looks at how his colleagues have coped with a similar task, and does the same. Thus, the entire information environment is filled with the same featureless content, simulacra signs.

Discussion and analysis

Twenty years ago, it could be argued that a person lives in the space of texts. Advertising was built as witty messages, the Internet was, first of all, a literary medium. In the 2000s, the Internet environment was actively looking for its own language, and this language was textual. The Internet environment parodied normal language, but it was a language based on words.

Human culture before the postmodern era was logocentric. The word is the basis of normal reality. Logocentric thinking is the thinking of a person of the traditional paradigm, vertically oriented thinking, connected with a clear system of values.

But the postmodern era, and especially the culture of the last decades, has shifted the focus of attention of users and inhabitants of hyperreality from the word to the flow of images, to moving pictures, from the hierarchy of meanings and values to complete axiological relativism. In such conditions, the attention of mankind is increasingly shifting from thinking to entertainment, from reading to consumption.

It is easier for a modern person to watch a short video than to understand the instructions, it is easier to watch a movie than to read a book. Today, educational content is being actively visualized, quotations, references to texts of the past, and complex ideas are being removed from it. But at the same time, the most educational video content is becoming more and more, the Internet is replete with video lessons in almost any field of activity or thought.

That is, the migration of mankind to the Internet is accompanied by a paradoxical process of rejection of logocentrism, of the primacy of the word. The authors of the study "Sign language units in syntactic constructions of Internet communication" conclude that in modern Internet communication, the classical "image - word" connection is replaced by another chain of meaning formation in the process of communication: "image - symbol (sign)" ^{[11, p. 154]}.

Along with the rejection of the word comes the rejection of thought, of the idea, of the very process of thinking. That is why it can be argued that the postmodern era is over today, because despite all the superficiality, the favorite means of producing content in the postmodern were precisely games with meaning, I mean, references to cultural codes.

Currently, hyperreality is beginning to use not words, but a language that is built over words, a metalanguage. Such a metalanguage of hyperreality becomes a design that builds a system of images and connotations over a system of words and meanings.

Today, any Internet user perceives, first of all, a picture, and only then, in some cases, a text. Even in communication, emoticons, stickers and pictures increasingly displace the description of emotions, feelings, replace whole expressions and thoughts. The authors of the study of modern Internet communication also write about this: today "expressive syntax techniques, graphemes and emoticons (emojis) are actively used" ^{[11, p. 154]}.

Design as a way of organizing disparate images into related structures becomes the main language of communication in such conditions. Design creates an identity, that is, a corporate identity that distinguishes an object from the environment, and also creates visual communications – a way to navigate the information environment.

At the same time, the design language is developing, changing under the influence of the logic of the development of hyperreality itself.

The very structure of hyperreality, the Internet, is a rhizome. Rhizome, the term J. Deleuze and F. Guattari, this is a fundamentally unstructured system or a haphazard structure in which everything is connected to everything, but at the same time it does not have a single organizing axis – the Logos. That is, the rhizomatic structure is a rejection of the very principle of the Logos.

That is why the objects of hyperreality are becoming less and less similar to the objects of primary reality: "instead of the object of representation, there is the ecstasy of its denial and ritual destruction: hyperreality" ^{[1, p. 149]}.

In the 2000s, when humanity was just mastering the Internet, the design language used signifiers imitating objects of primary reality. This style of design was called skewomorphism. Hyperreality tried to imitate the reality of objects. In design elements, for example, in icons, volume, materiality, chiaroscuro, reflexes were emphasized. Hyperreality used chiaroscuro and perspective, that is, the means of creating the illusion of objective reality.

Developing, hyperreality is increasingly distancing itself from the objective world. Flat design is the main style in design today. Flat design completely renounces realism, volume, even color – from all the features that characterize objects in reality. The stylistics of the flat design turned out to be the visual embodiment of what Zh. Baudrillard called "the nihilism of neutralization" ^{[2, p. 213]}. In the language of flat design, hyperreality "has the power to turn everything, including what denies it, into indifference" ^{[2, p. 213]}. That is, paradoxically, modern flat design does not highlight, but neutralizes objects, hides, creates a visual void.

Flat design is a natural result of the development of modernism design. In the 1920s, modernism and modernist design developed as a paradigm of rejection of transcendent meanings, of the past, of human and divine reality in favor of the world of technology, science, globalization, and the future.

It is not surprising that in the modernist design of the 1920s, the international style became the dominant style - a language in which designers can speak anywhere in the world, which is suitable for everyone without taking into account national peculiarities. The main features of international design are geometricism, purism, minimalism and the absence of references to transcendent reality. This style is suitable for any point of the globe: international design met the interests of globalization. In fact, the international style is the same style as in today's flat design. Flat design has transferred the features of modernist international design into a virtual space.

At the beginning of the XX century K. Malevich wrote that "the meaning of technology is to give a person peace through a machine" ^{[12, p. 496]}, it is this peace that tries to reproduce modern flat design visually. Today, designers argue their minimalism by the fact that in today's information-overloaded world, a person should be given the simplest possible messages. The sincere desire of designers today is to minimize human efforts. Therefore, any signifiers are consistently removed from the design.

However, what is good for utopian ideas about technology is not suitable for a living person, and here the problems of modern design begin. For example, mail designers mail.ru (this design technique can now be seen on many resources) remove the inscription and the "delete" icon. Now, if a person wants to delete a letter, he must tick the letter, and only then a very conditional urn icon appears. The designers wanted to reduce the workload, but instead achieved the effect of confusion, when a person has to guess what he should do. Many websites and applications become such a quest: the user must guess which element is a hyperlink, and where to click.

Thus, modern designers, striving for minimalism, have ceased to take into account that their product is addressed to living people. The perception of a living person requires color accents, a compositional center, games with meaning, etc. But all this is not present in a flat design. Live communication gives way to programmed communication, a test: "the entire communication system has moved from a complex syntactic structure of the language to a binary-signaletic question/answer system – a system of continuous testing" ^{[1, p. 134]}.

Hyperreality turns out to be the realm of Thanatos, carries out the primary urge of matter according to Z. Freud – a return to the inanimate ^{[13, p. 54]}. And this process is understandable and natural. Hyperreality is not an increase in being, meaning, reality, but, on the contrary, a decrease in being. The departure of humanity into technogenic reality, determined by the desire for peace, in fact turns out to be a return to non-existence.

If a person needs a body to operate with objects of primary reality, then a body-without-organs acts in hyperreality ^{[14, p. 773]}, a person becomes an avatar. That is why modern design practically does not focus on human senses. Today, designers almost completely abandon color, contrasts, ergonomics, do not focus on the laws of composition and visual perception. Today, the design language abandons the syntactic rules of classical composition, the laws of color harmony, since these laws were developed for the physical world and for perception by the physical body, for primary reality.

Probably, the body-without-organs does not need traditional communication either, so the design begins to use signs that are not intended to convey messages.

Until recently, the rule formulated by U. was valid for any sign. Eco: "a sign can have the following qualities of an object: optical (visible), ontological (assumed) and conventional, conditionally accepted" ^{[4, p. 163]}. The design of modernism has abandoned the first two qualities, and today design uses signs in which there is practically no conventionality left.

Design constructs hyperreality in such a way that it is not a copy, a picture of reality. If "a picture has a common logical and pictorial form with what it depicts" ^{[15, p. 21]}, then in hyperreality this identity is lost. Hyperreality is built as an independent environment, with its own inhabitants, and the language of this environment is increasingly distancing itself from the usual language of communication.

Such a design does not simplify, but complicates communication, the virtual world becomes inconvenient for human organs of perception, unergonomical. Lee Constantinou, exploring the modern cultural situation, notes that "inconvenience can serve as the dominant aesthetic category" of the modern era ^{[16, p. 218]}.

A curious feature of the semiotic structure of modern design is the extreme poverty of both the syntagmatic and paradigmatic dimensions of the design statement.

For example, the structure of the site can be considered a syntagma in the hyperreality environment, and the possible design options, the background color and the dies, the design of the elements can be considered a paradigm. In the design of the 2000s, the syntagma of the structure of a web resource was built from a set of specific and understandable elements, and the paradigmatic dimension could include, even within one resource, hundreds of design options, nevertheless preserving a certain unity, which was precisely provided by the design syntagma. As an example of such an Internet resource that has gone out of fashion, we can call the website diary.ru . Today, the design of this site seems outdated to users.

Today, the syntagmatic dimension of any Internet resource is not a rigid logocentric system, but a rather blurred rhizome. At the same time, the paradigmatic dimension has become as identical as possible, devoid of diversity, not only within one site or application, but also when comparing different resources. For example, today all social networks are as close as possible to each other in design. Today, a user may not even immediately determine which social network he is currently on if his attention is distracted.

The convergence and simplification of the syntagmatic and paradigmatic dimensions makes design as expressionless as possible, and hyperreality – an exceptionally homogeneous environment. Such an environment is a response to the demand of globalization: the global world strives to eliminate diversity, to turn both primary reality and hyperreality into a homogeneous consumer environment. 

Results

The result of this research is the explication of design as a metalanguage of modern hyperreality.

At the same time, the identification of modern design as the main means of communication allowed us to identify the problem: modern design, due to its hypermodern specifics, is not very well adapted for human communication. Moreover, normal communication in hyperreality is not implied. Perhaps the identification of the problem will also make the direction of its solution clear: a way out of the simulation impasse is possible if simulacra is abandoned as the main type of signs.

Probably, the future of design is connected with the search for a new style, different from flat design and more responsive to the needs of human communication.

Conclusions

Today there is an active search for its own hyperreality language, and it is the metalanguage that becomes it, since hyperreality does not contain Logos, internal structure and hierarchy. In its development, hyperreality strives to distance itself as much as possible from the primary reality and develops its own syntax and its own paradigmatic structure.

Design becomes a way of organizing this new way of communication, a metalanguage. Hyperreality is extremely simulated. The units of hyperreality are simulacra. The simulacrum becomes the main type of sign that uses modern design for its messages.

At the same time, the language that developed the design, the language of simulacra, turns out to be quite inconvenient. In the modern study of metamodern, this is formulated as follows. "The metaphysical core of metamodern design can be summarized as follows:  conception and design exist everywhere, but not everything is conceived and amenable to design" ^{[17, p. 75]}.

The main way of constructing messages in modern design is the style of flat design. Flat design simplifies both signifying and signified design statements as much as possible, since it is constructed as a set of featureless simulacra signs.

This design creates a homogeneous hyper-environment suitable for the modern world of globalization. This environment is created as an environment for consumption. But a person cannot live and communicate in such an environment. Live communication, including in hyperreality, requires an appropriate language.

Perhaps the further development of design as a hyperreality metalanguage is connected with the search for new means of expression, other iconic forms more suitable for human communication. It can be predicted that in its development, the design will soon move to some new period. Now this period is beginning to be called metamodernism, in other cases – pefomatism. A new period in aesthetics will be associated with the return of transcendence, which was completely rejected by modernism, and which postmodernism did not return and did not intend to return. For example, R. writes about this. Eshelman, speaking about photography: "the purpose of performance photography is to create, so to speak, the effect of transcendence – transcendence, which is formally tangible, but the source of which is not directly accessible to the viewer" ^{[18, pp. 374-375]}.

A new attempt to talk about transcendence within hyperreality will require a different form of signs from which the design will build its messages, other expressive means. One way or another, a new period in design will be associated with the return of human perception, human emotions to visual content.