Martin Krampen

Martin Krampen (March 9, 1928, in Siegen – June 18, 2015, in Ulm) 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. 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. 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.

He was a co-editor of Zeitschrift für Semiotik.

Select publications

"Meaning in the urban environment". Routledge; 2013 May 13. "A semiotic perspective on the sciences: Steps toward a new paradigm".Anderson, M., Deely, J., Krampen, M., Ransdell, J., Sebeok, T.A. and von Uexküll, T., 1984. Essential Readings in Biosemiotics, p. 377. "Phytosemiotics". Semiotica, 1981, 36(3–4), pp. 187–210.