From a social semiotic perspective, rather than being fixed into unchanging "codes", signs are considered to be resources which people use and adapt (or "design") to make meaning.
In these respects, social semiotics was influenced by, and shares many of the preoccupations of pragmatics (Charles W. Morris) and sociolinguistics and has much in common with cultural studies and critical discourse analysis.
They explain that the social power of texts in society depends on interpretation: "Each producer of a message relies on its recipients for it to function as intended."
(1988:8)Hodge and Kress built on a range of traditions from linguistics (including Noam Chomsky, Michael Halliday, Benjamin Lee Whorf and sociolinguistics), but the major impetus for their work is the critical perspective on ideology and society that originates with Marx.
Hodge and Kress build a notion of semiosis as a dynamic process, where meaning is not determined by rigid structures, or predefined cultural codes.
They argue that Ferdinand de Saussure's structuralist semiotics avoided addressing questions about creativity, movement, and change in language, possibly in reaction to the diachronic linguistic traditions of his time (the focus on the historical development from Indo-European).
The flow of these infinite processes of interpretation are constrained in Peirce's model, they claim, by the material world (the "object"), and cultural rules of thought, or "habit".
Theorists such as Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen have built on Halliday's framework by providing new "grammars" for other semiotic modes.
Like language, these grammars are seen as socially formed and changeable sets of available "resources" for making meaning, which are also shaped by the semiotic metafunctions originally identified by Halliday.
In the field of graphic design, the multimodal and social semiotic viewpoint can be perceived as an illustration that connects our sensory abilities together opening up new opportunities for deeper visual interaction.