The word \u2018na\u00efve carries\u2019 with it a disparaging tone, but in some ways na\u00efve realism just feels like common sense. And in our day-to-day functioning this idea of perceptual experience being a simple mirror of reality might serve us relatively well. So why should designers\u2014and for that matter, photographers, artists, and film-makers\u2014bother about the nuances of representation, reference, and communicative intention? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Representing a tree seems relatively unchallenging, but what about representing an argument, or a brand, a story, an emotion, or an identity? These things would not seem to be things we can point to and represent, in the same way we can point to a tree. It may be nonetheless tempting to think of ideas and emotions as things, like trees, that exist \u2018outside\u2019, and independently of us. After all we might not be able to show a quality like love directly but we can show the effects of it on human behaviour, facial expression, or by making associations to things, \u2018outside\u2019 that are physical objects that we can see, like a red rose. But this idea of an \u2018inside\u2019 and an \u2018outside world\u2019 is itself problematic for reasons we will discuss later. So approaching representation as simply the act of holding up a mirror to externally existing things is questioned below.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Some of these difficulties are foregrounded by reflecting on the images below. A juxtaposition of images such as these may well be familiar, whether linked to the sounds takete-maluma<\/em> (K\u00f6hler, 1929) or bouba-kiki<\/em> (Karthikeyan, Rammairone, Ramachandra, 2016). When K\u00f6hler first presented similar word\/image pairs to participants, there was nothing that could be pointed to in the world (neither sound nor image) that these pairs were conventionally associated with. They were newly imagined and created for the experiment. Yet nonetheless most respondents unproblematically associate one of these images with one or other of these sounds. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Maluma \/ bouba, left. Takete \/ kiki, right.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n With regard to our discussion about representation this raises a couple of questions. Firstly, can it be said that \u2018maluma\u2019 represents<\/em> the shape on the left, or conversely that the shape on the left represents<\/em> the sound \u2018maluma\u2019? Secondly, to return to the na\u00efve realist position, when both sound and shape were newly imagined, there was nothing that could be pointed to in the world identical to either sound or shape, so how come there was still something meaningful about these combinations? Indeed over years of showing these sounds and shapes to students, they have been easily able to extend the association, so that one shape or another was consistently paired with concepts (rather than with sounds) such as male (right image) or female (left image), or excited (right image) or relaxed (left image), or quick (right image) or leisurely (left image). <\/p>\n\n\n\n In answer to the first question, it feels like there is a connection between, for example, the shape on the left and \u2018maluma\u2019 but it is something of a stretch to say that this shape represents the sound (or vice versa) something extra would seem to be needed before we can use the term representation<\/em>. What that additional thing is will be explored in the next section where we compare and contrast signification<\/em> with representation <\/em>and of the link between form <\/em>and meaning<\/em>. Similarly, in relation to the second of these questions, in the sections that follow we will explore how the whole understanding of \u2018inside worlds\u2019 and \u2018outside worlds\u2019 that underpins na\u00efve realism has been questioned, and suggest that it is better to think of an embodied experience<\/em> of a tree, or of the sound \u2018maluma\u2019, as the thing that is represented, rather than the object or the sound itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/hylomorphic.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/maluma-takete-1024x542.png\")
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