Multimodal Semiotics and Collaborative Design

It is certainly important that designers know how to create visual symbols for communication
and how to construct physical artifacts, but unless these become part of the living experience of
human beings, sustaining them in the performance of their own actions and experiences, visual
symbols and things have no value or significant meaning (Buchanan 2001a: 11).
Socio-cultural and ecological perspectives on design often emphasize the designers’ role in shaping
the world, generating and solving problems that affect people’s lives globally (Thackara 2005,
Simonsen et al. 2010).
Uncertainty, unpredictability, irrepressible emergence and the lived everyday creativity of
collectives makes the world fluid. This fluidity must be matched with sensitive, responsive and
‘fluid’ practices of researching and designing (Simonsen et al. 2010: 12).
Human communities are capable of achieving extraordinary things by creativity and design, while
their actions and decisions may also have damaging consequences for the environment. This
emergent nature of design introduces wider cultural and ecological dimensions to designers’
practice. For Simonsen et al. (2010) approaches in sustainable design should be “synchronized with
social innovation in everyday practices” thus involving policies and politics. Therefore, design
activity in an ecological context should fundamentally follow and interdisciplinary and critical path
in order to capture the complexity of social practices in a wider (global) context. In this perspective,
the term ‘making products’ implies a broad range of phenomena “including information, artifacts,
activities, services, and policies, as well as systems and environments” and it is a “connective
activity that integrates knowledge from many fields for impact on how we live our lives” (Buchanan
2001a: 7).
Design professor Guy Julier (2006, 2008) proposes broader meta-theoretical dimension to study
how design shapes and is shaped by the dynamics of the socio-cultural environment by proposing a
shift toward ‘design cultures’, rather than simply talking about ‘visual cultures’. For Julier, design
denotes "the activities of planning and devising as well as the outcome of these processes, such as a
drawing, plan or manufactured object” (Julier 2008: 4), thus it can be used both as verb and noun.
In this view, design culture is both a context-informed process/practice produced within the
complexity of everyday life, and a form of agency for social and environmental change. Julier’s
perspective of ‘design culture’ (Julier 2006, 2008) shifts the focus of study from a ‘problem-solving
activity’ to a ‘problem-processing activity’, which incorporates related knowledge from various
disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, ethnography and geography. With its broad
epistemological foundation, the perspective of design cultures presents a network of
interdisciplinary practices, rather than simply a multidisciplinary network of various actors.
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