MEANINGFUL FORM, DECODED

The point of creating forms is to make an idea communicable or to make that idea persistent enough to use, continuously or repeatedly, over time.

The use of the form is what gives it meaning. "Usage" includes intentionally experiencing the form whenever that is relevant to a need or desire. Naturally, issues such as which form is "the right one" for the usage are basic here.

But what makes a form "right", due to its availability and effectiveness, is the distinctive way that availability and effect are preferred in the specific occasion. While that is equally true for builders, designers, and composers, the following pertains to making text or images.

See six varieties of preference here:

Aside from pure accident or coincidence, the use of the chosen form exploits the form's exposed characteristics to generate an intended conceptual and emotional reaction to their presentation.

That reaction may, at one extreme, be "first-and-only-time" (original and unique); at the other extreme it may be entirely "tried-and-true" (learned and conventional). Either way, it is the immediate exposure and experience of the form that originates "meaning" (the distinctive importance) compared to all other occasions of experience -- whether in comparison the meaning is different or similar. Typically, we then associate the meaning with the form.

That association can happen at least because the experience has a pattern that matches a pattern of the form -- but entirely differently from that, it may happen simply because we decide to agree and rehearse making a certain association as a rule.

Individuals can choose how it happens, but groups can also decide how it happens.

This accounts for how a given form could have a uniquely private meaning decided by a person, or a largely public meaning decided socially or culturally. But underlying both is the same range of ways that meaning is recognized.