Multimodal Semiotics and Collaborative Design

designing into account, as well as their transformations during the process. The social semiotic
framework explains the contexts (of situations), semiotic resources, meaning potentials and social
functions of sign systems (Halliday 1978, 2008, Hodge and Kress 1988, van Leeuwen 2005, Kress
2010), as well as their multimodal organizations within place semiotics (Scollon and Scollon
2003).
A general aim of this section is to present and discuss the relevant perspectives to the methods in
which I conducted the inquiry, generated the particular research questions and strategies, and built
the analytical model to interpret the findings. Therefore, it builds on the overview of the relations
between the overall research questions, the research design, and my rationale in using SL as the
field of study. The discussions hereby should be considered in reference to the context-specific
affordances and constraints of VWs for conducting qualitative research, which have been outlined
in the theoretical framework.
Methodological questions and objectives
I propose two operational research questions in order to set out the methodological strategies and
develop guidelines for the inquiry of the main research question 1 . These operational questions aim
to support the analysis by putting emphasis on the two central theoretical foci, which were drawn
on the synthesis of multimodal social semiotics and design research.
1. How do social actors, places and practices construct nexus of co-design practices in order to
engage in and give meaning to SL’s affordances and constraints for collaborative content
generation
2. How do virtual places and artifacts reflect their social functions and the co- designers’
rhetorical intentions through multimodal representations of potential affordances and
constraints
The first operational question focuses on the analysis of mediation of discourses in design
practices, and inquires how the various nexuses of practices are produced. The second question
emphasizes the textual dimension of systemic functional analysis, and aims toward multimodal
analysis of the products of designing. The three central concepts in the social semiotic framing of
communication –semiotic resources, meaning potentials and context of situation – guide the
analytical framework. I draw on concepts such as ‘actors, places, practices, co-production and codesign’
from an interdisciplinary array of theories to discuss the methodological implications of
1
How do the VW users co-produce multimodal meaning potentials in virtual places and artifacts through collaborative
design, as exemplified by the social semiotic analysis of the three case studies in SL
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