Martin Krampen


Martin Krampen was a leading German semiotician, semiotics Professor in Göttingen.

Biography

The son of a Protestant pastor, Krampen was born on March 9, 1928 in Siegen and was raised in Wuppertal. He took courses in psychology, philosophy, and theology the University of University of Tübingen and the University of Heidelberg, and studied design with a focus on painting at Accademia delle Belle Arti di Firenze. In 1953 Krampen began studying graphic design and visual communication at the Hochschule für Gestaltung. After graduating from the school with a diploma in, he went on to obtain his PhD in Visual Communications from Michigan State University in 1962. While there his studies were focused design and psychology.
Krampen worked in the field of visual semiotics and environmental perception, as well as a professional artist. Over the course of his career Krampen held position at universities across North America and Europe teaching courses in social psychology, semiotics, and the psychology of design. He was the University of Waterloo's first full-time research associate, where he worked alongside professor George Soulis to study the influence of design on industry. Krampen taught Visual Communication at Hochschule der Künste from 1977 until his retirement in 1993.
Krampen is credited with establishing the field phytosemiotics, the study of vegetative semiosis. His work would go on to become an important branch of semiotic biology or biosemiotics. Donald Favareau notes that Krampen's 1981 publication "Phytosemiotics" in Semiotica is referenced in nearly every introductory overview of the field and that his work is responsible for expanding the scope of Thomas Sebeok's zoosemiotics info the broader study of signs in relation to living organisms. In a similar acknowledgement of Krampen's influence, Kalevi Kull credits Krampen's work as "an important step in incorporating biology into semiotics."
He was a co-editor of Zeitschrift für Semiotik.

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