Frankly, I think the sign and the signified are useful tools for conversation and great for destabilizing absurd metaphysical claims, but are all but useless if we are concerned about junction/disjunction. Meaning stems from relation and relation is as much about junction as disjunction.

Also, I find it interesting that is an atypical way of understanding thinking and design. I am just trying to process Dave’s thinking in categories that I am familiar with. You see, I have a very classical liberal education and, true to his analysis, a poor visual sense. I am nearly illiterate: my left hand fights my imagination.

Your question, “what are the effects of the diffusion of power and authority and how do we design for them,” is spot on.

Diffusion of power creates an authority void and an implicit sense of anti-expertism since we realize the experts are fallible and perspectival. This gives the comment culture and anecdotal evidence greater gravity and, in turn, fosters a multitude of counter-narratives.

But that is only one piece of the puzzle, I suspect, for great design. We also need to be concerned with increasing digitization of information and how that affects our views of physicality and objectivity (in its barest, most literal sense). This is why all the cool kids are talking about paper and why, IMHO, print media will never fully die.

How this translates practically, I am not entirely sure. But, then, I am just beginning to learn about the visual arts.

I have never been hot on the disjunction between the sign and the signified: they are philosophical artifacts rather than the furniture of our experience.

What is interesting is how new technologies (some high, some low) are changing the nature of authority in knowledge, politics and even the mediasphere. This has very much to do, I think, with the proliferation of read/write culture emerging from the Internet as a social place/space.

The question is: what are the effects of the diffusion of power and authority and how do we design for them?

Clay Shirky’s idea that emerging media, design and forms of production and organization are leveraging the cognitive surplus that accrues from the decline in TV view is a really interesting place to start thinking about these questions.

I also think it is absolutely right and proper to equate the thinking (and the importance of their questioning) of Derrida and Dave Gray. Dave, I think, starts to get us much closer to the world by focusing (at least implicitly) on visual experience as a text. This has an amazing democratizing power, as it forces us to express complexity within an accessible vernacular. This is as revolutionary as printing the Bible in the “vulgar” tongues of Europe: it snatched religion and its authority out of the hands of the Church and the priests and allowed at least the emergence of the idea that everyone was on a level. This was the wedge that gave birth to modern democracy.

What new democracies will the Internet and visual language give rise to? It has already elected (created?) the most interesting world leader in a quarter century: YES IT DID!