In this section we're going to explore three more important modes of meaning. Spatial meanings, which involve shape and proximity and movement through space. Tactile meanings, our interactions with objects. Gestural meanings which are bodily expressions, hand and arm movement, facial expressions, bodily presentations such as clothing and of course body language. These modes of meaning are very closely interconnected. And they connect as well to oral and written meanings in multimodal literacies environments. >> This series of videos is about making spatial, tactile, and gestural meanings. So just to put them in the bigger context, we're trying to build a grammar of multi-modality, if you like. We're trying to say that we can make meanings in the world using language. We can make meanings in the world using image. And here are three more modes that we want to look at, right? Which is spatial, tactile, gestural. And one of the key things we want to say is we can make the same kinds of meanings in all these modes. And the modes are also different in some significant ways as well so we're trying to explore those things. So, let's take spatial first. So, spatial meanings in buildings, you go to a house and there's a hallway. And there's a living room, and there's a kitchen and there are bedrooms. That we configure our meanings in the world in spaces. We sit in a lecture theater, which is different from sitting around a table talking to other students in a kind of a group work set up which is different from a laboratory. So education is configured in these different ways and by the way the discourse is configured in different ways depending on the spatial arrangement. A supermarket that is different from an old fashioned store where the person used to serve you. They're different social relationships which produce different discursive relationships, different patterns of meaning. And by the way supermarkets are full of writing, you guide yourself around with the big bits of writing, which take you to things. You read the very fine print, because you want to say if this damn thing you're buying in the supermarket is going to poison you, it's got some horrible chemical in it, you don't want to have to deal with or whatever. So, there's lot of writing in this, so these are genuinely multi-modal spaces and they configured spatially. But beyond the spaces of things like buildings. There are geographies. There are spaces of cities where there are poor people in some places, and dangerous places, and safe places, and rich people in others. And there are parks as opposed to roads, and there are big roads and little roads. So, in other words, we build the patterns of our lives in these geographical spaces. And also what there are in the world are spaces which haven't been actively designed in quite the same way. So a building an architect designs, landscapes are the product of lots and lots of people. And planners and whatever so there are actual professions that think about how these spaces are configured and how meanings are made. Landscapes might be just natural landscapes but even those, we make sense of them. We think, that's beautiful and we go to look out and we see the view. So the beauty of the space is something that we design into it. And we're directed to it by other people who say, go to this lookout. Likewise, scientific meanings. I mean, I'm going out and I'm looking through a telescope at the universe and I look at the moon or look at Saturn or something through a telescope or whatever I'm looking at. And these remarkable things, but it's the meaning I give to those things which have cosmological meanings or scientific meanings. So even things which in the world of space, little space, big space, landscape, outer space, [LAUGH] all of those things. We attribute meaning to them and in fact part of our agenda as human beings is to build meanings into those things. We love national parks, and we're fascinated by astrophysics and so on. And also, across all this might be ecosystems, the way in which these things work as our support systems, our environments, the things around us as well. So this is what we mean by spatial meanings. So now in a way, just to repeat something I've already said, but in a way which is a little bit more explicit. There are spaces which are designed by persons, so they have meanings designed into them. And these are often architectonic spaces which are spaces which are, architectonic might be a bigger word that describes everything from a building to a cityscape where the buildings come together. And there are also natural spaces where we ascribe meanings such as beauty or scientific exploration. And there we're designing in the meanings. They're equally meaningful spaces to us and we design in those meanings. I'm going to just look at one of these spaces, now an example of one of these spaces of work. Here's just a photograph. And you can see there are people sitting around tables. These tables are three or four people, have three or four people around them. And also, there's some people who have been walking down the street, met each other, sitting on a park bench, starting to talk. So these are all the ways in which these spatial meanings configure conversations, particular types of conversation. So there's the phenomenon of being a pedestrian. There's the phenomenon of sitting around a table in a cafe which provokes conversation. And those spaces are different from sitting in a theater, for example, or a number of other spatially configured relationships. That's one example. People who do design analysis of these kinds of spaces are really interested in how the spaces are configured. Architectural [INAUDIBLE] are interested, town planners are interested. There's a quite lovely book called The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, which we reference on the website. And In the book, which is if you like a detailed analysis of the kinds of social life that happened in these spaces. So often a big austere [INAUDIBLE] Plaza in a city might be awe inspiring, but it's not a very good place to have a conversation. Whereas the intimacy of a cafe is a good place to have a conversation, for example. So how do we pause, how do we deconstruct these spaces. Now I'm going to go in now and do a little deconstruction of a store. And this is actually a drawing which we adapted from a book, called Design for Effective Selling Space. In other words a store is a heavily designed space. So what are the kinds of things that we don't always see when we go in about that design? Now the analogy is this, a sentence is a heavily designed thing. And we speak, or we write sentences all the time. And we often don't think about the design of a sentence, we just feel it, and do it, and experience it. But there's something intricacy about the design of a sentence. Something intricate about the design of a sentence. Well, there's something intricate and heavily designed, about the design of the store as well. And this illustration here is a thing called a bounce plan. So what you do is you walk into a store and you look to the left, you look to the right, you look to the left, look to. There's a set of patterns around the way in which you look and so this is represented in a bounce plan. One remarkable thing which I didn't realize which is something called an invariable lift. I don't know what is means, but most people, you can see here, more people come in and head left than head right, in this particular pattern of things. So, I don't know whether it's the fact that a majority of people are right handed and something to do with brains. I really have no idea what the reason is but it just happens to be the case. So what happens is you head left, you see something and then your head turns right, you see something. So what you want to do is things that you want to sell you put in lines of vision, because you've designed the pattern of how long it is from one bounce to the next. As you walk you turn your head one way or the other and as you work your way through the store. Now, here's the funny thing about stores. Well, not a funny thing, a cynical, manipulative thing. There's a notion called a destination item. So, the stuff that you really want is always put in a obscure places. Why is the milk down the back corner of the supermarket? Because you're probably going to buy a milk and eggs and things and all the things you really don't need are the things that are visible. But they might attract your attention and you might purchase them. You're going to get the milk anyhow, so we're going to put it somewhere inconvenient. And we going to design a bounce plan which takes you all the way to the back of the store to get the essential things and you'll see as much stuff that might grab your attention and then you might purchase along the way. You know, the stuff that you would not normally purchase, is the stuff that's most visible some piece of nonsense which is there you know, as a spacial, let's put at the end of the aisle. And so on. So these are heavily designed spaces. And in a way when you think of the ideology of the design, they're highly manipulative spaces in terms of our multi- [INAUDIBLE] grammar. There's an intention in there, that design, you have an intention which is I want the milk but there's an intention in the design. Which is designed to lure you into buy things perhaps that you don't want, the stuff for the children, let's put at this level. So they can see it and ask for it [LAUGH] and so on. There's a whole elaborate design, spatial grammar if you like inside, something like a store.
