Thematic Card: Design Langue

On October 13, 2025, Oliver Ding participated in a LinkedIn discussion initiated by a design education researcher about the meaning of Strategic Design. One comment suggested using job postings to explore how this concept manifests in the market.

The next morning, while revisiting the discussion and noticing a reply to his earlier comment, Ding realized that he could apply the Product Langue framework to study “Design” itself — thus developing a Design Langue research project.

Introduced in 2023, the Product Langue framework offers a linguistic perspective on product engagement. Drawing on Ferdinand de Saussure’s dichotomy of Langue and Parole, the framework distinguishes between the abstract system of language (Langue) and its concrete, situated expressions (Parole).

In this framework, Langue represents the core identity of a product — its abstract uniqueness. Across different contexts, Langue manifests in diverse forms, each corresponding to a particular Product Speech. Based on this model, Ding has identified 14 types of thematic spaces and 5 types of product speech.

To generate the Design Langue framework, AI (Claude) was used to transpose the Product Langue framework into the domain of design, serving as the foundational reference for the “Design Langue” theme.

Details of the Design Langue Framework can be found in the Thematic Brief of the “Design Langue” theme, with the original Product Langue framework attached as reference.