Multimodal Semiotics and Collaborative Design

4.3. Collaborative design, user-driven innovation and social
creativity
Collaborative design tasks involve complex design problems, the necessary knowledge on which is
usually distributed among various stakeholders (Arias et al. 2000). A share understanding of the
problem space, as well as development of potential solution spaces, depends on their capacity and
efficacy for working and thinking together through mediational means. Collaboration in design
activities refers to the idea of ‘distributed cognition’ ,which emphasizes that the “heart of intelligent
human performance is not the individual human mind in isolation but the interaction of the mind
with tools and artifacts as well as groups of minds in interaction with each other” (Arias et al 2000:
88). The distributed cognition approach aims to provide platforms and tools consumers in order to
allow them to express themselves, and develop a design culture based on people’s meaningful
interactions with each other through objects and spaces. As Ernesto Arias and his colleagues
describe: “[n]ew media that allow owners of problems to contribute to framing and resolving
complex design problems can extend the power of the individual human mind” (Arias et al. 2000:
84).
A relevant example of fields of study here is the user-centric and participatory approaches to
product design, and particularly user-driven innovation (i.e. von Hippel 1976, 2001. Jeppesen and
Molin 2003, De Moor et. al. 2010). A central notion in user-driven innovation approaches is the
transition from the idea of ‘isolated innovators’ to ‘communities of user-innovators’, where a great
deal of knowledge sharing and learning take place within the interactions of users (Baldwin et. al.
2006). Within the theoretical framework presented here, community-authored virtual worlds, such
as SL, are considered as socio-technical environments for the users to explore their innovative
potentials, and experiment with different modes of co-design in a shared virtual environment. The
users interact in different contexts, by gathering different data and using different tools, and
experiencing different pressures on a design problem (Jeppesen and Molin 2003). Therefore,
creating and managing user-driven innovation is shaped by the proper motivation and
coordination of people to develop and implement new ideas through various forms of social
relationships (Van de Ven and Poole 1990). As the creative users explore the possible design spaces
within the provided solution space, they generate various possible design solutions and methods,
while generating a detailed ‘mapping’ of the solution space. Until the solution space gets ‘mined
out’, users continue to produce and share knowledge among ‘communities of user innovators’, and
try to expand the possible space. (Baldwin et. al. 2006, von Hippel 2001) The creative integration
of the users can be enhanced by organizing and designing appropriate toolkits for them to work
with. With potentially innovative toolkits provided by the platform developers; users can develop
new technical ideas, new products and new methods; some of which can later be developed into
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