Umwelt building in creative education: exploring interdisciplinary pedagogies in the module AcrossRCA

1 Introduction

AcrossRCA is a module mandatory to all postgraduate students at the Royal College of Art (United Kingdom): it is a collaborative, interdisciplinary project that forces individuals to study and work with colleagues outside of their habitual cohort and peer group, mixing with other specialisms to produce teamwork in response to urgent contemporary challenges. According to the module handbook, the purpose of AcrossRCA is to promote engagement with peer, academic, and professional networks, understand the role of collaboration in addressing urgent complex challenges, and awaken to the value and social responsibility of creative practice. The students were not evaluated by the quality of the team outcome but through an individual reflective statement that aimed to demonstrate the students’ ability to describe and critically evaluate the collaboration, the experience, and its impacts on their professional development. The module was structured into core skills seminars, which address the necessary skills for the project, and collaborative team tutorials, where students get to discuss their specific team process, progress, and unique challenges.

As one of the tutors leading a cohort responding to the theme of Justice, Equality and Misinformation, I worked with 30 students from eight different countries (and my own nationality made the sum total nine) coming from master’s courses in Architecture, City Design, Contemporary Art Practice, Curating Contemporary Art, Design Products, Digital Direction, Information Experience Design, Innovation Design Engineering, Interior Design, Fashion, Jewellery and Metal, Painting, Photography, Sculpture, Service Design, and Visual Communication – alongside semiotics, to include my own specialism. Working in six teams of five students for six months, the cohort responded to an open briefing with no rules of what could or could not be produced, as long as ethical challenges were properly identified and addressed. By the end of the project, my teams had produced a fashion collection and accompanying photoshoot; a collaborative interactive book; an educational escape room; an interactive installation documented as a video archive; a video reel and accompanying zine; and a video game. It was an extremely successful cohort, with one of the teams making it to a competitive selection of 20 outputs (chosen from more than 400 teams) to the AcrossRCA 2024 exhibition. Some of the insights in this article were first presented in an internal event at the Royal College in May of 2024, where I shared best practice in AcrossRCA teaching. My work was also presented at the 16th Congress of the IASS/AIS in Warsaw, integrated in the panel “Transference between Realities: Semiotic Relativity and Umwelt Building” (Jardim 2024c).

A pedagogical initiative essential to mitigating professional challenges graduates will face in a very near professional future – both when it comes to the themes themselves and the challenging environment created by the module – AcrossRCA attempts to disrupt existing pedagogical canons and poses challenges to traditional specialist education and the comfort of monocultural educational environments, where all students are similar in professional aspirations and interests. The blending of STEM, fine arts, creative industries, and design specialisms, combined with the internationalized environment of the Royal College of Art, creates situations in which the learners, as well as the tutors, must, quite literally, learn to see through the eyes of another – to understand unique visions, perspectives, and practices, the specific set of processes each individual can contribute, and what the limits of specialisms, skills, and ways of knowing are. More than requiring a set of tools, teaching in this environment entails the development of a new pedagogical vision which is capable of guiding students into developing (or rediscovering, recognizing) the skills necessary to navigate the unique challenges of international, intercultural, intersectoral, and interdisciplinary collaboration.

In one of my previous pedagogical works (Jardim 2021a), I explored the encounter of critical pedagogy, contemporary creative industries practices, and postulates from phenomenology and semiotics in the construction of, more than “creative,” generative pedagogy. Working with concepts from Greimas’s semiotics (see Greimas 1970, 1983, 1986, 1987; Greimas and Courtés 1993; Greimas and Fontanille 1991), I designed a set of pedagogic practices mirroring the journey of generating meaning through semiosis and semiotic analysis as a generative trajectory of knowledge, in which the individuals learn to engage with each one of the levels – discursive, narrative, and fundamental (Greimas and Courtés 1993) – by identifying the specific substances of the course content and understanding the various depths at which one can meet with the material, specific theories, and their research objects. This pedagogic model, however, was developed around an education theory for a monocultural environment: although my cohorts were extremely diverse when it came to ethnicity, nationality, and cultural backgrounds, they were united as students taking the BA (Hons) Fashion course at the University for the Creative Arts, Epsom. To accommodate the interdisciplinary demands of AcrossRCA, my Greimasian foundations also had to be enlarged to accommodate other semiotic paradigms: Lotman’s (1990, 1992; Lotman and Clark 2005), semiosphere, and Uexküll’s (2013; Sebeok 1979) Umwelt. Lotman (2002) remarked that, more than being new words, these concepts demand paradigmatic changes in the practice of theory by reversing epistemological positions. Thus, the passage from a planar understanding of cultural processes to a spherical one found in Lotman and the reversal of the deterministic formula into a model of a significant world at the inception of the Umwelt theory offer a model, as well as a conceptual base, to further the idea of a generative pedagogy to accommodate the clash of worldviews occurring in interdisciplinary settings, enriching my Greimasian sphere with broader ways of perceiving and new paradigms that permitted me to apprehend further, enlarging the limits of my practice.

In addition, my past works on identity and the deconstruction of surface cultural “oppositions” that reveal equivalent cultural narratives and fundamental values (see Jardim 2019, 2020, 2021b, 2022, 2024a) provide a foundation to enact the same dissolution of contrarieties in professional and epistemological views: rather than being a problem exclusive to ethnic, national, cultural, or religious identities, the dynamics of Otherness and binaries of “us versus them” are also central to the interactions between professions and academic areas. Addressing those dynamics in an integrative manner, thus, is at the core of promoting genuinely interdisciplinary collaboration, while fulfilling the aims of engagement and shifting of perspectives a module such as AcrossRCA is supposed to harness.

This article aims to first present an overview of my past efforts in producing a semiotic pedagogy and then address the developments in my own model as a result of accommodating the pedagogical reflections I produced through my teaching of AcrossRCA. The final section will present the AcrossRCA case study and the description of specific practices I designed and implemented in the sessions with the cohort. I aim to argue that the specific problems encountered in interdisciplinary collaborative environments constitute matters of semiotic modeling, thus connected to Umwelten and semiospheres and their explosive encounters. Drawing from other theories – such as Santos’s (2009) ecology of knowledge and Guattari’s (1989) three ecologies – my work continues an argument for the reintegration of semiotic theories (see Kull 2024). In the macro, this project reflects the necessity for the reintegration of biological, cultural, and subjective realms into the same level of experience, both in the analysis of objects and in the design of pedagogical practices that are expanding, rather than narrowing down the possibilities of learners and future researchers and professionals (Jardim 2024b). Furthermore, this article outlines a model of education aiming to accommodate dialogue through the tools utilized to develop a certain disponibility to exchange with others, which draws from Landowski’s (2004, 2005, 2009) theories of contagion and adjustment, creating conditions to deconstruct cultural and professional assumptions and exposing subjects’ overlapping interests, aspirations, and ambitions. Finally, following the critical pedagogical tradition outlined by Freire (1970) and Vygotsky (1987), and continued by Deleuze (1986, 2003) and Guattari’s (1989; Deleuze and Guattari 1980), this piece reflects on what roles and competences the tutors and students must embody in response to an “ecological” project of interdisciplinary dialogue, so as to mitigate the professional, subjective, environmental, and epistemological challenges of the 21st century.

2 A semiotic pedagogy

At the start of my career in the UK higher education system in 2015, the constraints of time, physical space, and intersubjective relations I encountered enacted a forced collision between my semiotic understanding of reality and my qualification in critical pedagogy. Unlike the study program for the university qualification I received in 2003–2006 and 2012–2014, back home in Brazil, which was marked by multiple, sequential long-duration modules aimed at continuity of subjects and depth of knowledge, in the UK, courses were much shorter, thus demanding effective curation of content. A large emphasis was placed on “independent learning,” which contrasted with the secondary education reality in the UK, where students receive early specialized training, taking only the subjects of their choice. Consequently, home students come to the university with considerable gaps in general knowledge, which works against the project of independently studying a subject. As a result, engagement with theory courses in “creative degrees” is low – to the extent that, today, some UK universities are making the decision to phase theory subjects out of the curriculum altogether. In my institution at the time, the current student results in my subject were extremely discouraging, with a high incidence of failures and attempted academic misconduct.^[1]

In this context, it became evident that classical pedagogic theories alone would not carry the answers to the challenges I faced, which were typical of another interdisciplinary clash: the blending of education with business management, and the blurred lines between learners and customers.^[2] To mitigate these obstacles to engagement and adapt the contents of my curriculum to maintain the quality and depth I expected to deliver despite the constraints, I submitted the existing syllabi – from the courses I taught and the other courses my students attended at each stage – to a semiotic analysis, aiming to extract from it the necessary knowledge, skills, and competencies my students required from my modules so that they could succeed holistically in their education (and subsequent entrance into the professional market). More than an analytical tool, the semiotic principles from Greimas’s (1970, 1983, 1986, 1987) and Landowski’s (2004, 2005, 2009) works provided me with a set of creative tools that could be used to inform the design of the programs.

Unlike existing areas, such as edusemiotics (see, for example, Semetsky 2010, 2013, Semetsky and Stables 2014), which aim to create a new theory uniting semiotics and pedagogy, my work identifies where and how semiotics already is a pedagogical theory and practice, for example, by using Greimas’s (1986) criteria for the selection of the corpus as tools for content selection: representativity, exhaustivity, and homogeneity. In such a model, first, the content is intentionally fragmented, and a “provisory corpus” is identified and offered to learners. Second, the criteria of exhaustivity belongs to the learner, which is required to test the provisory corpus on the larger manifestation – their project or research interest of choice – with the aim of verifying if the analysis is replicable in the larger sample. Finally, the criterion of homogeneity permitted me to group themes that would not normally blend together simply by changing what section of the phenomenon the analysis would focus on. For example, when delivering a module on Fashion History in only five one-hour sessions, I chose to organize the content not in centuries, decades, or any other diachronic frame, but to identify five key developments in a Western history of fashion businesses and brands and to use each session to visit, across time sections, the emergence and development of those innovations. By creating a structure never seen before, the course acquired an aura of interest that helped students to break from the chronological historical framework, seeing connections between the synchronic chains that govern innovation and development in the arts, fashion, and design.

However, another use of the semiotic theory in that context referred to the cultivation of human relations by examining content, course structure, and classroom dynamics through the lenses of the regimes of interaction proposed by Landowski (2005, 2009). More than an innovation, my work with this theory offered a semiotic vocabulary to many other pedagogical writings that approach the importance of love and care in education (see, for example, Deleuze 2003; hooks 1994). The contribution of semiotics, however, rests in the possibility that, by understanding relations in an almost algebraic, logical frame, love and care cease to be personal or subjective affects to become modes of interaction that can be replicated as narrative algorithms that do not depend on the tutor’s personal feelings for the student. Rather than imposing on educators that they must love their students (even when they don’t) or that peers must love one another, Landowski’s (2004, 2005, 2009, 2010) image of adjustment as a regime in which subjects are in direct contact, without the mediation of objects of value, can be read as the abstract mechanism behind the acts of loving and caring, as an unconditional form of contact. Instead of deploying strategies to make other subjects act in an expected way so as to achieve specific results, Landowski’s adjustment presents a model of interaction in which “being there” is the only goal. In what he described as an unmediated form of contact (Landowski 2005), esthesis – the ability to feel and make others feel (see Greimas 1987; Greimas and Fontanille 1991) – spontaneously emerges from the mutual discovery of subjects.

Some of the insights from this “experiment” (Jardim 2021a) paved the way for the developments in this model to accommodate AcrossRCA. One of the core propositions emerging from my pedagogical application of semiotics and socio-semiotics is the matter of subjectivity conferred not only on human subjects, but also on theories, study areas, and research “objects”: one of the premises of Landowski’s (2005) regime of adjustment is the absence of constructed hierarchies between subjects, achieved by inviting a form of symmetry in the interaction that can result either in mutual accomplishment or mutual annihilation. In my own trajectory as a learner, Landowski’s adjustment offered me a precise impression of the relationship with an object or a theory when one is in a state of flow: similar to his image of the volute (Landowski 2010), one can be sucked into a vortex in which time and space no longer matter, and only the pure intersubjective relationship makes sense.

To expand this principle from the monocultural environment of my Contextual and Theoretical Studies courses to AcrossRCA’s interdisciplinary project, the first step was to reflect on the meaning of interdisciplinarity: its insufficient dictionary definition as “relating to more than one branch of knowledge” provided me only with the answer to why it is so difficult for this time of collaboration to result in a meaningful outcome. The blending of disciplines requires more than a surface collage of subjects to construct the appearance of more than one knowledge area: it is at the fundamental level, in the blending of mechanisms and values informing each discipline, that the intersection must occur. On its own, the prefix inter- refers to “between, among, mutually, reciprocally”; thus, to cultivate inter- practices worthy of their name, one must look beyond the utilitarian or instrumental approach to knowledge areas – semiotics included! – and strive for a genuine integrative collaboration, in which more than the surface of knowledge areas and professional practices are collated. In other words, it is possible to classify interdisciplinarity as not belonging to the realm of finished utterance [énoncé], but an indicative of a processual event that unfolds between subjects – the human and nonhuman subjects as agents, as well as subject in the sense of discipline or knowledge area. Such a distinction is crucial when it comes to the current fashion of interdisciplinary teaching, learning, and working: the desire for a definition installed in the realm of utterance [énoncé]indicates the desire to solidify a formula, to define and construct models of what “interdisciplinary looks like” – so that it can be replicated.

My point of departure, thus, was to find solutions through which subjects, disciplines, and professional practices can be truly invested with subjectivity, and to enter in relation from their semio-narrative level, and not only through the surface or the level of the “look.”

3 Educational and professional specialisms as subjective Baupläne

As a phenomenon of encounter, like any encounter between two (or more) subjects, genuine interdisciplinarity will never look the same twice. Similarly to the assemblages of different forms of life (Tsing 2015), the situational encounter of disciplines is a multilayered phenomenon, resulting in an assemblage of different ways of being and making meaning in the world. In such circumstances, various iterations of semiotic modeling are at play as a series of Baupläne: the blueprints that govern the process of becoming of life forms. Beyond Uexküll’s (2013) biological and biosemiotic understanding of the concept, what constitutes our significant environment (Umwelt) contains more than natural information. Surpassing the project of categorizing what elements of our reality are “natural” or “cultural,” in my understanding, our languages, cultural milieu, social class, ethnicity, gender, and religion, as well as the unique languages and practices of our chosen disciplines and professions, constitute a fundamental lens through which we make meaning in the world – thus integrating our Baupläne as the algorithm of our becoming as subjects.

For each individual, their modeling is unique. The emergence of identity scholarship proposing themes of intersectionality (see Crenshaw 2017) is a symptom of this impossibility of identity as idem-entity: with each layer of experience, a unique Bauplan is being shaped to include more ways of seeing – alongside more significant signs that constitute one’s unique imprint of the world. Although the project of intersectionality resulted in the creation of more subcategories – which, in turn, create more separation and, thus, more points of conflict – my argument rests on the uniqueness of each subjective experience – which also results in the uniqueness of each new encounter between different Baupläne.

Thus, to argue for the transposition of the concept of Umwelt from a merely biological phenomenal world to a phenomenal world that is also epistemological, we must recognize that each different discipline, way of knowing, and specialism also constitutes a distinctive ideological Bauplan. Each individual interprets knowledge, research objects, briefings, and interpersonal situations through their unique frame or model, which is constituted through the accumulation of Baupläne derived from their personal and interpersonal experiences, combined with the models offered through their education. By education or training or qualification, I mean the combination of factual data a subject was exposed to – which one could define as the “dogma” of study areas and professions – and a set of fundamental values, which we could describe as a certain ethos that differs from profession to profession, from discipline to discipline. One of the ways to understand this second aspect is, for example, observing what kinds of competencies are encouraged (or discouraged) in the process of education: while intuition and sensitivity are nurtured in subjects leaning toward the humanities, mathematical certainty is valued in subjects leaning toward technology, and so forth. The sum of data and values communicated through training constitutes what could be described as a semiotic system that, in turn, is formative of the “identity” of a subject area and those partaking in its learning, practice, research, and teaching.

Although we tend to see the opportunity of pursuing higher education (HE) as the possibility of expanding one’s horizons, the reality of HE today goes in the opposite direction, in a system developing toward narrower and narrower specialisms that shrivel not only subjects’ professional possibilities but their ways of seeing and the prospects of dialogue between different professions (Jardim 2024b). As we elaborate on our understanding of educational models as Baupläne, it becomes clearer that all modeling is incomplete: every choice made by an individual means the loss of a set of competencies, which, often, shut out different perspectives as false or incorrect because they don’t fit in with the dogma of their chosen discipline. This scenario is aggravated when the mainstream discourse constructs preferences for certain forms of knowledge that are perceived as “more objective” or “truer” when it comes to specific issues. Such dynamics result in hierarchies determining what subjects must be in charge of responding to “important challenges” and what subjects are not entitled to participate in the discussion. Finally, it is in this vicious cycle that, in the mainstream perception (which is also what informs funding and education policies), the arts are relegated to the role of “commentators” and the social sciences to “critics” of reality – but not the ones who can play a role in transforming society or creating solutions.

When seen from the outside, individual Baupläne approximate the meaning Levinas (1972) creates for the visage, as a mechanism through which we encounter others. For him, the encounter with an Other is necessarily that which puts the me into question, emptying me of myself; the desire for another is a fundamental movement, absolute orientation, which is meaning [sens] (Levinas 1972). We encounter others through the visage, denouncing the impossibility of direct or privileged contact with the world of ideas: everything must come through a mediation, which installs third persons in the interaction. To remove mediations requires an extreme vulnerability, which can be translated into the necessary exposure required by inter- practices across cultural forms. So that genuine interdisciplinarity (and interculturalism) can take place, the fundamental values must be exposed; not specific postulates, practices, or formulae, but the paradigm from which these are constructed, informing ways of seeing, being, and doing in the world.

The process of undressing required by interdisciplinary collaboration is profoundly personal and emotional, as the exposure of the core of our truths is an exposure of our vulnerabilities, in a process that includes both students and educators, who also must partake in the process so that genuine inter- phenomena can occur. Such vulnerabilities can emerge in various forms: the rejection of the Other and their ideas, worldviews, and the processes of research and development; the polarized attack on the “weaknesses” or “inadequacies” of other ways of knowing; the rationalization, through hierarchical arguments, of what specialism should be in charge of what; and the virtualization and realization of various fears surrounding miscomprehension, cultural acceptance, and adequation of own knowledge to the task. In essence, these processes reflect rejections of Baupläne that are Other to one’s own semiotic system and modeling.

The fear associated with interdisciplinary collaboration is in consonance with the theme of Outside (le dehors) in Foucault (2015): in Deleuze’s (1986) commentary, this line of the Outside appears as our own double and the alterity carried in it. The Other discipline appears as this Outside and the act of inter-secting knowledge and practice must occur in this beyond-and-back-again motion, in which subjects – both human and epistemic – are transformed when they reach out of themselves. Deleuze continues, remarking that this line is deadly, too violent and too rapid, taking us to “an unbreathable atmosphere” (Deleuze 2003: 151) – a line one must simultaneously cross and make practicable and thinkable. In Foucault, this process appears as a bending of the line so as to constitute a “liveable zone” – the production of subjectivity (Deleuze 1986, 2003).

As individuals enter their process of subjectivation, each response to the encounter with the line of the Outside is equally unique: the innovation associated with interdisciplinary collaborations is nothing more than the sum of individual struggles in crossing the line and making it liveable. In a process where various lines are bent – since each discipline has its own set of criteria that ensure the line is liveable to its practitioners – interdisciplinarity occasions the emergence of assemblages, in the sense Tsing (2015) utilizes the word: open-ended gatherings that don’t just reunite lifeways but allow them to be co-created in a form of polyphony. The assemblage can be translated into an intersection of Umwelten: rather than competitive operations of imposition of ways or the domination of one thought frame over the other, the assemblage occasions the creation of a third Umwelt that is shared by two (or more) subjects. It is through semiosis, and the articulation of Umwelt and Innenwelt – loosely translated as the “inner world” – that subjects are “translated” so as to make them liveable, creating a third space in which the accomplishment of the assemblage surpasses what subjects could have realized (or, even, devised) by themselves.

The ideas of assemblages and a liveable line of the Outside touch upon the image of an ecology of knowledge propounded by Portuguese sociologist Santos (2009): rather than present a paradigm in which different ways of knowing are fragmented and segregated, Santos argues for a logic in which, like in an ecosystem, different forms of knowledge co-exist and are seen as interdependent. For Santos, although society creates hierarchies in the valorization of different forms of knowledge, it is important to recognize that no knowledge form possesses, by itself, the necessary tools to comprehend the totality of a phenomenon. Thus, a synergy of different forms – both formal and informal, produced by both dominant and marginalized subjects – makes an epistemological ecology possible (Santos 2009), as much as, in the life world, the synergy of different organisms makes life itself possible. In Santos’s understanding, the only possible path to achieving an ecological approach to knowledge is by flattening hierarchies that prevent subjects and disciplines from participating in debates or in the creation of solutions. His argument, in many ways, approximates Guattari’s (1989) proposition of an ecosophy: a model of ecology in which the solutions for mitigating crises in the natural environment must be articulated in conjunction with the social and subjective environments – a line of reasoning that attributes the ecological crises to the separation of those three vectors by scientific and economic systems.

4 Umwelt and semiosphere: cracking the spheres

According to Kull (1998: 304), the biosemiotic concept of Umwelt is defined as the semiotic world of an organism and all of its aspects that are meaningful for that organism: the Umwelt is that which unites the semiotic processes of an organism into a totality. He remarks that the Umwelten of different organisms always differ, since the unique significant worlds depend on “the individuality and uniqueness of the history of every single organism” (Kull 1998: 304). Finally, a semiosphere can be described as the set of interconnected Umwelten (Kull 1998: 305). These matters of individuality, uniqueness, and historicity contained in von Uexküll’s concept of Umwelt open up the possibility of understanding this postulate beyond the biological dimension of organisms – since cultural and linguistic processes are also formative of our personal histories as organisms in a culturalized world.

The forceful encounter between spheres appears, in Lotman’s (1992) semiotics of culture, in the metaphor of the explosion: an event in which the destruction of spheres enables the emergence of a third language. Rather than the combination of elements from one sphere and the other, or the dominance of one sphere over the other, the emerging third language is more than the sum of the parts: it is something new, a result of the encounter and the reconstruction of the “fragments of the explosion.” By transposing this event to the collision of Umwelten as individual spheres, the explosion can enact their destruction, which may (or may not) be followed by the construction of a new, unique world. In the realm of knowledge, such destruction relates to the shattering of certainty that our worldview is the best, that our culture is the superior one, or, simply, that our way of working is the only viable possibility. However, to truly collaborate means, to invoke Landowski’s (2004, 2009) image of the destructive adjustment, a form of mutual annihilation: a pure, unmediated encounter of two agents that causes both to disintegrate into one another.

The vision of destruction in confrontation aligns with the perception that, in the encounter with the other, some kind of adaptation will be necessary; when we reconstruct our damaged boundaries, they are not the same as they used to be – there will be either a slight expansion, in an optimistic view, or a contraction into further conservatism which, unfortunately, is the most common outcome to the diversity efforts in mainstream society. In the classroom context, the violent cracking of spheres is often manifested as resistance to the Other: a combative positioning that aims to prove the Other is wrong, to convert the Other to one’s own view, or to shut them out by disengaging with what is being said. Quiet or loud violence also often appears in the form of “rational arguments,” in which the claim for the “superiority” of one discipline over another to address a specific challenge or portion of the project is deployed, creating hierarchies and dogma around who is entitled to speak on what matter.

Although our preferred discourses about knowledge and education focus on the cognitive strategies facilitating the transmission of data and the computational, operative dimension of learning, there is also a contemplative level of cognition that is affective and felt corporeally by subjects. Beyond the security of skill transfer that is governed by a regime of programming (Landowski 2005) and based on coded sense (Oliveira 2013), the production and transmission of knowledge are also marked by the uncertainty and adventure of regimes governed by hazard and by esthesis. Deleuze’s (2003: 141) image of the philosopher as a “diver,” cultivating forms of thinking that are “dangerous” because they reach beyond the safe waters of the surface, refers to the production of knowledge outside the realm of predictable algorithmic interactions. Part of the danger, noted by both Landowski and Levinas, lies precisely in the unpredictability invested in the encounter with the Other – be that a person, a cultural sphere, or, in the present argument, a different way of knowing.

Beyond the unexpected clashes that ignite explosions, affect can be harnessed through an intentional opening to receive the Other on purpose, anticipating the violent conflict and, instead, choosing to enter into a pure relation leading to mutual accomplishment. To achieve such a state, however, it is necessary to go beyond the surface understanding of the Other’s value. To genuinely partake in contact, subjects must reach beyond the matter of what skills can be deployed or what computational information is needed in a situation, reaching toward a more profound space – which, in generative semiotics, refers to the semio-narrative level (see Greimas and Courtés 1993). Despite some identifiable superficial differences between two ways of knowing – for example the factual information accepted by different areas, or what their research outputs look like – the point in which epistemologies and professions truly diverge are installed in the paradigms from which subjects are taught to operate through their education and qualification. It is at that level that spheres can open and become primed to intersect: it requires subjects to become aware of their own modeling (and the extent to which it differs from others), and to acknowledge the other’s modeling as valid and possible, suspending the hierarchies and crystalized programs governing the perception of different areas and disciplines.

From that level of interaction, a genuine third language can emerge, otherwise, we may be producing manifestations that create an effect of interdisciplinarity at the surface (or discursive level) but, at the significant core (or fundamental level), there is no transformation de facto in the paradigms informing the actions of subjects – only a bricolage of discursive forms that deploys a simulacrum of collaboration without enacting it.

In Uexküll’s (2015; Sebeok 1979) biosemiotic theory, the creation of signs by organisms is a form of adaptation to the Umwelt, which is developed in the process of an organism’s life as more and more meanings are incorporated to constitute the Innenwelt: the inventory of meaning one uses to navigate the relations between themselves and the surrounding environment. As such, the relevance of our education, professional practice, and forms of knowledge as chained adaptations that support the navigation of our environment becomes evident. The construction of meaning between the inner and outer worlds must occur through mediations, which are signs themselves. In his essay exploring the concept of pharmakon in Plato, Jacques Derrida (1989) provides us with potential tools to support those challenging mediations between the students and the tutors, and between peers. Plato’s idea of the pharmakon unites functions from the biology of individuals and their subjectivity in one, offering a possible image for the articulation of Umwelt and Innenwelt. As subjects constitute their internal phenomenal world through signs, the identity-less anti-substance of the pharmakon mediates this construction of sense through its ability to shapeshift. As a semiotic substance, it can take the form of that which it wishes to emulate, to then reverse itself into something else once it enters the subject, taking an epistemological or ideological form – a reversal of states through a certain form of “intoxication” that helps subjects to open up to the idea of learning as an “ecstatic experience.” This semiotic malleability of the pharmakon creates the possibility of masking ideas and postulates in a format that is familiar to subjects from conflicting backgrounds, facilitating the necessary translations that allow for individuals to access elements that do not belong to their Umwelt, in a similar operation to linguistic translations: although words in distinct languages are not equivalent, we must find a middle ground – a third language – so that communication is possible, even if the transference of meaning is partial or incomplete.

In nature, we can use the example of the spectrum of sight to support this argument. What we consider to be the visible world is, in reality, a fraction of existing visual information that is manifested through wavelengths from 380 to 700 nm (or between violet and red light). Reptiles such as snakes, on the other hand, can see outside both ends of this threshold, giving them built-in infrared vision that allows them to, quite literally, “see temperature.” Even though that information is not perceptible by our natural apparatus, we have acknowledged the relevance of the snake’s unique way of seeing and managed to emulate, via a special headset, the ability to see in the dark through the detection of infrared waves that surpass the human sensory apparatus. This example manifests an artificial intersection of two Umwelten, the human and the reptile, which constitutes a mediating third sphere enabling an enlarged grasp of visual phenomena that exalts the value of other visual abilities – one which, most ironically, is used primarily in military applications that aim at the destruction of Others, instead of their integration.

In any case, the above example of technology offers a valuable image of the distinction between learning the abstract theory of how snakes see versus the possibility of experiencing a section of a reptile’s phenomenal world (and, potentially, feeling captivated by its unique possibilities). Although the senses are not the only part of our apparatus involved in learning and professional practice, McLuhan (1994: 44–45) makes a compelling argument about how the specialization of our functions also causes our senses to become specialized. Thus, it is not only in the metaphorical sense that subjects in different specialisms possess different “ways of seeing,” as well as hearing, feeling, touching, and even tasting – both with their palates and in the socio-cultural sense. Thus, in the contact of subjects with others, their unique attributes – or, to use the trending term, their “soft skills” – can become a powerful tool for mediation and simulation of experiences. In this process, contact can transform subjects themselves into the medium facilitating the creation of signs through affect in the classroom exchanges. To achieve this objective, my design of classroom activities aimed at practices and propositions that could help subjects loosen their boundaries so as to become prepared to experience like others do, rather than “learning about” their experience. In this process, the unique vantage points of each one’s special ways of experiencing can be recognized and incorporated into the project, interaction, or situation.

In practice, my teaching in the module became a process through which students and myself could literally experience the others’ Umwelt through experimenting with their practices, processes, ideas, and ways of perceiving. The sum of such experiences results in an imprint of another Umwelt into one’s existing Innenwelt, which will not only share the characteristics of both, but contain the unique potential of one Umwelt seen through the eyes of a mismatched Innenwelt – an expansive and cumulative (rather than reductive and destructive) process through which innovation and development are occurring. In Derrida’s (1989) reading of Plato, the pharmakon is presented as a “pollutant” that deceives so as to disseminate itself in an organism through a strategy of constantly changing form. In a positive reading of this postulate, this powerful image offers a formula through which dogmatic, purist, reductionist conceptual frames (it doesn’t matter if from the humanities, social sciences, life sciences, or STEM) can be “contaminated” by another epistemological substance that has the power to enter the subject – or entire field of knowledge, through the transformed “contaminated” subject and their expanded practice.

5 Case study: teaching AcrossRCA

6 Closing remarks

When seen through the concepts discussed in this article, the act of educating could be defined as the intersection of various phenomenal spheres, in a process that is marked by a chain of explosions and reassemblages. At least two Baupläne or developmental algorithms are in clash: the student’s and the tutor’s; at least three Umwelten: the student’s, the tutor’s, and that belonging to the knowledge specific to the discipline. Learning is the effort to create a third (or fourth…) space, an acquired, common language between knowledge through the tutor’s Bauplan and knowledge through one’s own Bauplan, which, if done right, will enact a degree of expansion of one’s Umwelt – as well as that of the knowledge. Being “educated,” thus, means having one’s phenomenal world expanded and tweaking one’s algorithm to include new functions, new operations, and new possible computations of knowledge.

The present case study is one of the examples of how biological images can accommodate relations that belong to the linguistic vocabulary which, in turn, can accommodate wider relations of communication and value exchange in professional and pedagogical relationships. However, biosemiotics alone doesn’t contain all the tools: as I hope to have demonstrated, it is in the articulation of these concepts with readings of the structuralist tradition – Greimas’ generative method, or Lotman’s phenomenal understanding of culture – that a holistic understanding of an object of research or the construction of practices can begin to be shaped.

The sections above presented my reading, through the filter of my unique Bauplan, of those theories and their articulation. To close, however, I would like to include some of the readings presented by my students, and how concepts such as Umwelt and semiosphere, or principles from generative semiotics appear in their own vocabulary. For a student from the MA Painting, the dynamics developed in the unit facilitated each one to “find an environment”. According to a Jewellery and Metal student, collaboration is “more than each one doing their part individually”. A Digital Direction student, who was also profoundly touched by Anna Tsing’s The mushroom at the end of the world, concluded that “education, like sustainability, is also a problem of ecosystems.” An Innovation Design Engineering student shared that the biggest challenge in their experience was to learn about “things out of our control,” and how good relationships were fundamental in mitigating these; another student from the same course agreed with those statements, including that the “doing” changed their views about the theme, and how other passages – from “activism” to “response” and from “reading” to “experiencing” – were fundamental in their trajectory. An Information Experience Design student talked about how views can reverse after we come in contact with them, what they framed as “the appearance of words,” and how it shifts through the perspective of different majors. Finally, another student from the same course talked about how we can never really grasp what a concept’s “real” meaning is.

As tutors must develop their skills of translation, offering students a “safe environment” to encounter another sphere, the cycle must be completed, by acknowledging what translations the students themselves have created in their act of learning and creating a common space in which knowledge itself, knowledge according to the tutor, and knowledge in relation with their own unique phenomenal world are conciliated. More than “having knowledge,” teaching requires the ability to comfortably inhabit various Umwelten. To teach interdisciplinarily, this ability needs to be further enlarged through the softening of the borders of one’s own semiosphere and accepting the invitation to enter the space of Others (and inviting them in).

The experience of adapting my practice to accommodate AcrossRCA, besides allowing me to create genuine contact with 30 extraordinary individuals, deepened my “intuitive” understanding of semiotics as a discipline containing the key to unlocking the urgent dialogue not only between knowledge areas, but, equally, between professions and sectors. Thus, beyond a model for education, the concepts and practices described throughout this manuscript are also useful in supporting professional team-forming and interdisciplinary and intersectoral collaborations in universities, organizations, and businesses, reconnecting with the awareness of semiotic and pedagogical practices beyond the boundaries of the classroom.