Multimodal Semiotics and Collaborative Design

multimodal analysis in virtual worlds. I particularly focus on social negotiation of affordances and
constraints as construction of meaning potentials in design. In synthesis, the overall
methodological question that I frame in this chapter is "how can the rhetorical perspective of social
semiotics on multimodal semiosis contribute to our understanding of co-production practices in
VWs"
Virtual methods and virtual worlds as the field of study
For new media researcher Christine Hine (2005), the ‘claiming of the online context as an
ethnographic site’ points to a major ‘methodological shift’, in which the new communication
medium ‘provides the occasion for’ examination of new problem areas. She claims “the method and
the phenomenon define one another in a relationship of mutual dependence” (Hine 2005: 8). Hine
advises researchers to ask if changing the mode of communication affects any methodological
assumptions or practices that underlie the research. Hine’s description of virtual methods – and
more specifically ethnomethodology in virtual space- is important in a number of aspects, as it
offers ‘the archives of social networks and virtual worlds’ as both ‘contents’ and ‘discourses’ to be
analyzed (Jensen 2010: 130), and potential new ways and terminologies for conducting research
online, such as virtual focus groups, online ethnography, cyber-research, web experiments and
other offspring from old familiar methods (Hine 2005). In this perspective, the social world of SL
can be considered both as the cultural context and the cultural artifact (Hine 2000, 2005) for
collaborative design practices.
Following the socio-semiotic approach to multimodal sign production, I define collaborative design
of virtual places and artifacts as processes of multimodal semiosis, in which not only final products
of designing are considered as analytical units but also the social actors, and the variety of (digital
and non-digital) media platforms that they use. I conceptualize virtual places and artifacts as
semiotic entities, which bear the traces of their co-designers and social situations in which they
came to being. My focus throughout the analysis is on the inquiry of how different designers
experience collaborative design processes in SL, and how they build discourses on particular
affordances and constraints of the platform. The purpose of my multiple-case-study based
methodological framework is to explore the social construction of experiential, interpersonal and
textual meaning potentials in collaborative design practices for co-designers with different contexts
and conditions of engaging with SL.
Here, I combine the multimodal framework with the participant ethnographic approach in order to
support the interpretative textual analysis with participants’ social histories based on their socially
and individually situated perspectives, which frame their rhetorical intentions. For this purpose, I
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