I’m coordinator of Semiofest’s series of informal online “sessions.” These events are intended not only to share best practices among, but to nurture collegiality and friendship within the global semio community.

Coming up on April 25th (at 2 pm UK time)…

SEMIOTICS OF PLACE

Place can be a powerful way for brands and cultural strategists to generate meaning and value… and at the same time, in a world of bland developments and cut-and-paste tourism, semiotics can provide a crucial tool for meaningful place shaping. Gemma Jones has invited place-oriented practitioners to discuss place as a cultural “text”… and to share creative methodologies for developing a place-based participatory semiotics. 

Get tickets (suggested donations only) at the link above.

Our sessionists:

• NATASSA PAPPA is a publisher specializing in editions documenting the sense of place through visual culture. With a background in graphic design, she has founded Desired Landscapes, a pocket-sized magazine reading into a diverse mix of cities. Her research practice focuses on visual culture, oral history, urbanism, and the vernacular, and expands to more formats like walking tours, urban research workshops and gatherings.

• ROSANNA VITIELLO is the founder and director of The Place Bureau, a research, strategy and design studio that defines the future of places worldwide. She is co-founder of Urban Lexicons, a design research programme that draws on semiotics to explore how places speak to us and how we as citizens can speak back.

Session host: GEMMA JONES is an independent strategist specialising in decoding culture using semiotics, ethnography and trends analysis. She’s led cultural insight teams within agencies, and builds cultural capabilities within organisations via coaching, training and facilitation. Gemma loves exploring Place as a dimension of culture IRL and URL. She is also co-founder of School of Critical Design.

Also see these international series here at SEMIOVOX: COVID CODES | SEMIO OBJECTS | MAKING SENSE | COLOR CODEX