Multimodal Semiotics and Collaborative Design

and artifact descriptions without understanding the social situation in which they were created”
(Larsson 2003: 153). In Larsson’s view, members of a design team are in constant negotiation
about vocabularies, objects and places of design, through which they shape both the context and
content of the situation. In collaborative design activities, meaning is collaboratively constructed
through these negotiations and discussions between (co-) designers. Therefore, the results of
design activity cannot be separated from its social character.
On the other hand, respective roles of actors and contexts of collaborative design are often in flux,
being constantly re-constructed through creative practices of individuals and their interactions
with others. In collaborative activities, roles are ‘both an outcome of and a rationale for’ social
situations, where “[n]egotiating positions, and contributions to the negotiations, shift during
conversation as meeting participants collaboratively establish what is to be done and how
collectively they will justify what they agree to do” (McDonnell 2009: 49). Therefore, roles of social
actors are ‘assumed’ rather than ‘inherent qualities’; and each actor (i.e. designers, customers,
manufacturers) can contribute with their own domain-specific points of view.
To understand the complex web of relationships we need to take account of the social
expectations of all those contributing to a design (McDonnell 2009: 49).
Depending on the context of design activity, the context of creative problem-solving may often shift
from the individual sense-making to the interactions of a collective (Hargadon and Becky 2006),
whether these collectives are small groups or large populations of media users. Andrew Hargadon
and Beth Becky (2006) develop a model of collective creativity which includes both ‘individual
insights’ and ‘momentary collective processes’. Their model identifies four types of social
interaction, which triggers enactment of social roles and practices within creative problem-solving
activities as: help seeking, help giving, reflective reframing, and reinforcing. Their model
emphasizes the contextual factors by “shifting the emphasis in research and management of
creativity from identifying and managing creative individuals to understanding the social context
and developing interactive approaches to creativity” (Hargadon and Becky 2006: 484). According
to this understanding, individuals seek collective efforts and competences of social groups when
they do not have necessary expertise, ability or motivation to generate creative solutions alone.
Such a reconsideration of collective cognition in combination with creative problem solving in
design activities provides a necessary framework to study moments of collaborative creativity, and
how design-based discourses are generated, negotiated and communicated through both individual
and collective insight.
Effective collaboration requires a complex set of conditions, including the interpersonal
relationships among actors, the characteristics of the task, the quality of communication, social and
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