Multimodal Semiotics and Collaborative Design

of collaboration. Participant observation throughout the design process also provides insights on
the changing roles of various actors during several inworld and offline stages of the process (Hine
2005, Deacon et al. 2007). Furthermore, by participating in collaborative design and learning
activities, it is possible to gain first-hand experience on content design, while conducting
ethnographical observations of SL builders and builder communities in their cultural contexts. On
the other hand, I aim to initiate discussions on the past experiences and reflections on ‘how it could
have been done better’ by in-depth interviews with expert designers and novice users (students)
after the design process, when the designs are open for testing and evaluation. Especially during
the focus group interviews with students after the workshop design process, participants establish
unprecedented relations between SL’s affordances and their experiences, and generated a number
of ideas on how building tools and resources should have been developed.
The selection of the three cases also depends on the contextual variations of collaborative design
projects and the characteristics of the social actors who participate in their making. Similarities and
differences in how expert designers and novice users of SL is particularly of interest for my
analytical purposes. As it was documented in a number of research studies before, creating content
in SL requires a significant amount of knowledge, experience and effort. This forms a challenge
especially for beginners who are trying to cope up with this intricate ‘learning-curve’ that is caused
by the complexity of the building tools, as well as the time investment needed to get familiar with
SL’s social norms and resources (i.e. Sanchez 2009, Pfeil et al. 2009). Therefore, observing various
interpretations of and solutions to the learning-curve supports the analysis, as this perspective
includes how specific affordances and limitations are perceived by novice and expert users, and
how these affordances and limitations affect their collaborative design processes.
In order to capture the social complexity of collaborative design activities in SL, a wide range of
interconnected interpretive methods are employed during different stages of the research process,
as “no single methods can grasp all the subtle variations in ongoing human experience” (Denzin
and Lincoln 2005: 12). The qualitative analysis is based on the multimodal data produced as a
collection of field notes, image and video captures, face-to-face and online interviews, focus groups,
semi-structured conversations and various archives. The data is handled with an abductive and
grounded theoretical perspective, in which a continuous resonance of empirical findings and
theoretical categories lead to intensive coding and analysis procedures for production of
meaningful conclusions.
In the introduction to their influential handbook on qualitative research, Norman Denzin and
Yvonna Lincoln (2005) describe the research process by using the ‘bricolage’ metaphor, which
defines an approach that crosscuts several disciplines, fields and subject matters as well as
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