Code Ecologies: Reclaiming design as meaning-making within human–ecological systems

Abstract

This paper reclaims the role of design as a practice of meaning-making within human–ecological systems. While meaning has always been part of design discourse, successive turns – semiotic, experiential, relational – have addressed what meaning is without asking why living systems make meaning at all. Drawing on recent advances in neuroscience, biosemiotics and code biology, the paper argues that meaning-making is not a cognitive phenomenon unique to humans but a regulatory process intrinsic to living systems. Code Ecologies offers a philosophical framework that reinterprets the biosphere, technosphere and semiosphere as interdependent ecologies of codes, resonant with relational and Indigenous cosmologies. The paper locates design’s agency within the semiosphere, where meaning systems, values and legitimacy are formed, distorted or repaired. When these codes lose alignment, both social and ecological systems falter; design intervention in the ecology of meaning thus becomes a form of regenerative semiotic agency and a precondition for ecological renewal.