Multimodal Semiotics and Collaborative Design

epresentation on experiential meaning potentials are reflected in the systemic choices made by the
designers to shape certain design features.
The Interpersonal meta-function includes the categories of social relations and their relations with
design features, such as representation of co-presence and power relations, visibility and
intertextual metaphors (i.e. conceptual distinctions between virtuality and reality). Within this
meta-function, it is important to consider both the individual psychological relationships with the
semiotic objects (i.e. ‘binding’ and ‘bonding’ [Stenglin 2008, 2009]), and the social practices which
are constructed through interacting with them.
The Textual meta-function is concerned with the “systemic choices that relate a building to its
context as well as those that constitute it as a coherent text” (O’Toole 1994: 79). This third
dimension of semiosis also focuses on how the place is organized through divisions, partitions and
elevation, and how various spaces are connected to each other. The textual meaning potentials
provide semiotic patterns of information so that the place-as-text ‘hangs together’ (Stenglin 2009).
In Chapter 8 (Table 8.1.), I present a detailed systemic functional matrix modeled to analyze the
relational semiotic categories among the meta-functions and orders of systems (rank-scales) in the
design of virtual places and artifacts. I follow O’Toole’s (1994, 2004) advice of ‘shuttling’ between
boxes in different areas of the matrix to uncover the significant features. What I particularly search
for in the analysis is the ‘nodal points’ (or ‘hot spots’), in which the experiential functions about
containment, the interpersonal functions about contact and the textual functions about cohesion
interact to carry rich meaning potentials (O’Toole 1994).
Borrowing the term from C.S. Peirce and O’Toole, I aim to shift the focus from a structuralist
analysis of the semiotic text to the analysis of the dynamic processes of semiosis. In his analysis of
displayed art, O’Toole claims that “semiotic analysis of (…) representation, modality, and
composition reveals networks of options” (O’Toole 1994: 122). Therefore, the results of such social
semiotic analyses are often presented as a system network, which explains not only the modes and
what they represent, but also how they are related within the textual coherence of designed places
(Van Leeuwen 2005, Stenglin 2009).
To analyze what O’Toole calls ‘dimensions of semiotic space’, one starts by grouping meaningful
elements into compatible categories and arrange them in a rank-scale hierarchy. Then it is possible
to construct the matrix of meaning potentials and various features of design (i.e. virtual places,
divisions and elevations, interaction spaces, elements) to form a metaphorical ‘backcloth’ against
the ‘traffic’ of dynamic meaning-making processes (O’Toole 1994). Thus, it is possible to frame and
study certain aspects of semiosis as cultural production.
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