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Just be aware, to everyone else that word does mean the field of study, which is fairly advanced.
All the examples are specifically constructed by humans to carry, but not hide, meaning - Morse, Braille and Quipu "encode" information, but for transmission/accessibility/storage. Cryptography roughly translates to "hiding-writing" and is more or less specifically intended to keep secrets. An encoding is just a different representation of whatever underlying message, assuming one is there. As a result, they can only roughly be interpreted as encryption. Actual encryption means you can know which "format" it's in and still only get the original message if you have the proper key (or whatever).
All of this seems unrelated to seeing "messages" in mundane things. If you look at a flower and think "fuck me, that looks nice" that's great. If you look at it and think "well, the arrangement of these petals is clearly a message for me," then it might be a symptom of things.
I never said anything about "hiding" meaning (versus "carrying" it), but to someone in writing-centric societies, the effect would be the same, due to the presumption that writing is the axis mundi of physical communication. I also wasn't saying cryptography as a field wasn't advanced, just that this isn't the sense of the word I was referring to (any other word seems equally problematic, e.g. "encoding" typically is tech-related).
You may anticipate it as a "symptom" of something (maybe that's why we live in a writing-centric world in the first place), but you'd be surprised where it turns up so as long as someone intends it to. Someone discovered the objects on and around the table in the last supper painting functioned as musical notes for example. Would you call that "hiding meaning" or "carrying meaning"?