Published Paper Details:

This article is about exploring and highlighting the role for semantic analysis for educators, students, designers and consumers today. Here, visual perception of symbiosis inspired built form has been explored semantically. A catalogue of 17 designs of built structures that connote the idea of symbiosis was shortlisted by the researchers and 3 Design industry experts on the basis of a primarily visual examination. The conceptual grounding of this exercise was that the source forms are expressions and material manifestations of theoretical concepts, and could be investigated using semantic analysis. A cohort of 23 final year B. Des. students were tasked to verbally describe these images in English language. These descriptions were later rationalized by the experts in to 64 symbiosis related key-terms. These terms were analyzed by the experts using card-sorting and organized in to a set of 8 semantic-factors. This article shares the process and results of this exercise of analyzing symbiosis inspired built forms, and the synthesis of semantic factors underlying them.