Multimodal Semiotics and Collaborative Design

have been participating in various social events, meeting with inworld designers and following
collaborative design activities in SL for more than 3 years, during which I have conducted three
structured case-studies by mobilizing the inworld and offline (RL) social networks that I
established. My intentions in presenting such a framework is particularly to stress the emergent
epistemological and methodological convergence in relation to social semiotics and design,
especially in the light of growing dominance of multimodal expression in contemporary digital
media platforms such as VWs. In my analytical framework, SL represents this socio-technical
convergence in both tools and practices, and the three case studies illustrate various situations of
virtual place-making as nexus of multimodal socio-semiotic practices. This methodological
perspective requires a reflexive account of collaborative design as a communicative social action in
which signs are continuously constructed and reconstructed as social semiotic resources through
mediational means.
Although I frame the co-design of virtual places as social practices, one problematic issue about
observing design processes in VWs is the flexible and vague boundaries of their social contexts. In
collaborative virtual environments where users share virtual places and interact via avatars, it is
possible to build and test the designs, and evaluate them by the feedback given by the community.
When individuals do not have necessary knowledge or expertise, or required resources for idea
generation and building, they consult the collective knowledge resources of the VW community. By
using available media tools, they interact, seek and/or provide help, evaluate and develop each
other’s creations and reinforce collaboration in co-design and co-production processes. SL also
contains various libraries, locations and archives of commonly used construction elements
(textures, objects, effects, etc.), which support users to start exploring with resources at hand;
therefore, improving opportunities for creativity and participation. Collective problem-solving,
therefore, becomes an issue of interest and social investment; which is not only defined by
membership and presence in an established group, but also by the time and energy participants
commit to forming new types of social groups and collectives (Hargadon and Beckhy 2006). The
social actors, therefore, become parts of a wider and more complex network of social relations and
interactions with human and non-human elements that contribute to the making of sign systems.
Material semiotics and the perspective of Actor-Network Theory
A relevant epistemological and empirical perspective has been put forward by the ’material
semiotic’ (Law 1992, 2009) approach of actor-network theory (ANT) (Latour 1997, 2005), which
aims to unravel the formation of ’the social’ construction of meaning by tracking the networks and
meaningful associations between both human and non-human actors in technologically mediated
action (Lemke 2000). The actor-network approach provides a ‘family of material-semiotic tools,
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