Multimodal Semiotics and Collaborative Design

approach to collaborative design instead of being merely ‘fascinated by the potentials’ of the
technology or a ‘comparison to the face-to-face gold standard’ - as Hine (2005) criticizes- in order
to contribute to VW research field, and to communication research in general.
As explained earlier, I intend my theoretical and methodological reflections on meaning-making
through design and communication to traverse across a variety of disciplines mainly within
semiotic and sociocultural traditions. I intend to increase reliability of interpretations by giving
voice to several –theoretical and empirical- voices, while I keep continuous evaluation of validity by
reflecting on how the relations between research questions and methodology are constructed. I
have reviewed and modified my methods, as well as research questions, several times throughout
the research process. I prefer to follow Robert Stake’s (2005) advice on how the brainwork in a
case study should be observational but (more critically) reflexive in order to produce (and,
possibly, answer) foreshadowed research problems. My intention is to be as reflexive as possible
on the choice of methods, and assess their efficacy with respect to the initial research questions and
methodologies. Especially while describing the analytical strategies developed for this research
study, I take a critical stance and evaluate my positions as ‘the researcher’, in addition to teacher,
apprentice, builder, observer, or user, etc.
Double hermeneutics as strategy for inference
During the process of qualitative research, the researcher is often situated within the natural
settings of social practice, interacting with real actors and collecting their interpretations of what
has happened, how/why they think it happened, and what the perceived consequences are (Jensen
2010). In this respect, both the researcher’s own interpretations and those of the participants of the
study have equal importance in constructing the representation of framed social reality, and
research as a co-construction of meaning. Klaus Bruhn Jensen refers to this process as “double
hermeneutics”, which means “interpreting, not least, people’s own interpretations of how and why
they communicate” (Jensen 2010: 11). In the introduction to his edited volume on ‘Qualitative
Research In Action’, Tim May (2002) relates the idea of double hermeneutics to reflexivity by
discussing how epistemological and ontological presuppositions that “render the world intelligible”
construct (or are ‘built into’) the assumptions of the researcher, especially if the context of research
requires “a double movement of reflexivity in terms of possessing a point of view on the point of
view” (May 2002: 4). The role of double hermeneutics in co-construction of research as a
communicative practice is based on the antifoundational premises on co-production of knowledge
and interactions of subjects, as well as their internal transformations during the research process.
In this view, knowledge is the product of socially and culturally situated discourses (Ashmore 1989,
Finlay 2002), therefore the research object and identities of participating actors are co-
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