Being young in contemporary design artifacts

a semiotical process

Abstract

Concentrating efforts to understand how everyday objects can express youth, this work proposed to examine the internal organization of design products, with their structural characteristics, patterns and relationships. The analysis process was structured based on concepts from Peircean semiotics. The analysis of the artifacts was carried out at three levels: syntactic, which refers to the material dimension, structure and functioning of the product; in the semantic, which refers to its representative qualities; in the pragmatic, which refers to its dimension of use. In this way, the communicative strategies used to express youth in the object medium were identified: the adoption of a provocative design, the structuring of a toy appearance and the appropriation of styles and practices inherent to youth culture.