My colleague Jason Toal’s recent blog post on visual thinking exercises inspired me to take the Four Icon Challenge and capture the core ideas from How Things Shape the Mind, Lambros Malafouris’s facinating interdisciplinary exploration of cognitive archeology and material engagement theory.
I discovered Malafouris’ work through Jonathan Bean, Bernardo Figueredo and Hanne Larsen’s fascinating paper at EPIC 2017 on Material Engagement Theory and branding gestalt research.
What is ironic about me completing this exercise using icons from the Noun Project is that one of Malafouris’s core arguments is that conventional semiotics reifies representation and privileges human intention over systematic, dynamic explanations of meaning.
