Multimodal Semiotics and Collaborative Design

7. Analyzing the social contexts and the processes of
collaborative design
Introduction
The first of the two analysis chapters focuses particularly on the social contexts of collaborative
design in SL, and the processes through which virtual places are co-produced by the socially
available material semiotic resources. My motivation for including the analysis of the social actors,
the mediational means, and the practices of co-design is drawn on the nexus analysis perspective,
as well as the rhetorical perspective of multimodal social semiotics, which foreground’s the signmaker’s
intentions in construction of meaning potentials.
The analysis in this chapter begins with the profiles of social actors and discussions on
configurations of design teams in the three case-studies. I introduce each case-study and the
participating co-designers, and then set out various perspectives on their motivations, as well as
the organization of the design teams in relation to particular social issues, such as power relations,
task divisions and group hierarchies. The three case-studies show several differences and
similarities in terms of their participants, and the ways in which they organized their practices. My
aim in this part of the analysis is to present the socio-cultural factors that shape the co-designers’
engagements with the co-design processes, and discuss the contexts in which they use SL for their
purposes. The second section in this chapter foregrounds the use of mediational means and their
affordances. In this section, I analyze several issues in relation to their roles in constructing the
collaborative practices, including the use of SL’s graphical user-interface and its specific contentgeneration
tools, and the ways in which the co-designers find and appropriate material and
semiotic resources by using a variety of media platforms. The final analytical section is about the
analysis of collaborative design processes. Here, I analyze the use of SL’s virtual places and avatarmediated
co-presence affordances for co-design purposes, the perspectives and design strategies on
the interconnectedness of SL’s places within the world’s grid, and the ways in which the codesigners
organize their practices in time and (real and virtual) places. The overall analytical
contribution of this first chapter to my framework is to present a socio-technical framework that
supports the rhetorical approach by uncovering the communicative purposes of the sign-makers,
the means by which their messages become materialized as virtual places, and their methods for
collaboratively designing and producing the places.
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