Design as translation activity: a semiotic overview

The paper moves from the following question: can the design activity, intended as inventive and project-making activity, be viewed also as a form of translation? The answer such question compels us to overcome a paradox, because design does not involve a transfer from a source text from which it translates. Design generally acts like a translator and interpreter of social needs that previously exist as unstructured, non-textual, open-ended entities, thus exposed to uncertainty and incoherence and striving through design to acquire a proper structure, i.e. a textual form. From the extensive literature on the subject in semiotics and linguistics, here we will select and outline only the fundamental semiotic models that could help us overcome the paradox at least from a theoretical viewpoint and provide a plausible answer to our opening question.