Multimodal Semiotics and Collaborative Design

are contextualized by the socio-technical world, as they fluctuate in time and through the codesigners’
social interactions. As I have mentioned in Chapter 4, the start of a design problem is
‘wicked’ and the design is always ‘unfinished’, and this is even more so in SL’s collaborative
projects. Therefore, instead of looking at and then comparing only outcomes of the processes, the
methodological task should be to explore all the possible resources of meaning, understand how
the critical definitions, evaluations and practices on the designed environment evolve during the
process, both in terms of the collaborative activities and the communicative ‘repertoires’ of
participants (Liewrouw 2006, Haddon 2005).
Although the analysis of mediated social action is also foregrounded by the MDA approach to
social semiotics, humans as social actors, and their agencies in the context of situation is still
central. The non-human actors are considered as a part of my analysis if their affordances and/or
constraints have considerable influence on the ways in which semiotic practices are organized.
Following Lemke, Kress (2010) and others, my analysis focuses specifically on the making of sign
systems as multimodal assemblages of social meanings and practical functions. Thus, I foreground
the phenomenological perspectives in use and co-production of semiotic resources in making of
sign systems when I analyze the actors, places and practices of collaborative design.
On the other hand, I believe the collective knowledge on these issues is also socially constructed
and constantly re-produced by individual and collective meaning-makings, and therefore, is highly
contextual. To observe collaborative co-design of a VW, I continuously keep interacting with the
social world of SL, its designers and creative communities; and try to grasp the possible viewpoints
that make up a ‘virtual world’ paradigm, as experienced by these (world-) builders. This is why I
believe the consideration of social semiotic analysis in reference to the actor-network approach of
material semiotics can offer a promising methodological ground, through which it is possible to
study both (textual and social) dimensions of place-making.
Grounded Theory as a methodological bridge between theory and analysis
I apply the analytical procedures of GTM (Strauss 1987, Strauss and Corbin 1990, Glaser 1993;
Bryant and Charmaz, 2007) for coding and analysis, as method for production and interpretation
of the emergent data to support the systemic functional analysis. The characteristics of the
grounded theory approach helped me to develop analytical strategies for the observation of
collaborative social practices, the procedures applied for the constantly comparative coding and
categorization of data, and the strategies for mapping of the theoretical domain.
I use GTM as a supporting analytical tool, and appropriate certain GTM procedures (i.e. Strauss
1987, Strauss and Corbin 1990, Glaser 1993, Charmaz 2002, 2005, 2006, Bryant and Charmaz
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