This thesis investigates the relationship between communication and place, and the informational environment it forms. The thesis takes as its object of analysis signage, and examines signage as an implaced medium of communication. / In this work communication, including its practices and technologies, is treated as a dynamic ritual formed by the marking, naming, connecting, and interpreting the environment in the process of wayfinding. Such an approach underscores the inherent duality of communication: its manifestations framed by transmission and ritual; its boundedness by both space and time; and its expression in both mobile and fixed (implaced) media. The thesis thus shifts the disciplinary discourse from the usual text- and language-based focus to a more comprehensive focus that encompasses architectural and infrastructural environments and the grounding action of physical presences. Through its focus on the navigational aspects of communication, and framing by such concepts as wayfinding and signposting, the thesis shows how we can reconfigure the notion of the visual to include the embodied, experiential, and implaced. This in turn can help us gain a new perspective on the changing nature of text, image, representation, information and reality. / The thesis argues that as the themes of orientation, navigation, and interface grow alongside the new communication technologies, they make it important to attend to the original mediating role of the built environment and the navigational dimensions of place. It is here, within our foundational spatial orientation and wayfinding, that we turn for the metaphors, conceptual structures, and grounding as we chart our ways through the emerging informational environments. / In examining signage as a system of interfaces used in negotiating informational environments, as way-markers in a process of wayfinding, the thesis demonstrates the ways in which the concepts of wayfinding and navigation have become consequential to communication scholarship. It proposes that fruitful cues for the theorising and understanding of emerging informational realms can be drawn from the communicative dimensions of the most familiar immersive environments and their related practices: the physical spaces and built environments that we inhabit and negotiate daily.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.36891 |
| Date | January 2001 |
| Creators | Chmielewska, Ella. |
| Contributors | Crowley, David (advisor) |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Doctor of Philosophy (Department of Art History and Communication Studies.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001808237, proquestno: NQ69985, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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