Multimodal Semiotics and Collaborative Design

Superheroes. Caitlyn, whose needs and specifications primarily led the design process, mentions
that one of the principal ideas was to replicate an urban city landscape that is commonplace to the
specified genre:
Caitlyn: [I]t is just a big city with skyscrapers and a residential area, and a warehouse and a
museum and a park. It’s got all of your basic urban structures.
The PAL case is different in terms of its visual style. PAL is designed to emphasize the
distinguishing features and affordances of virtual places, and freedom from certain real-worlds
constraints, such as gravity and limitations of bodily presence. The co-designer interviews showed
that the dominant concern in the design of PAL was to be ‘not RL-like’. As the chief designer
AmyLee explains, the emphasis on being unrestricted by so-called real-world constraints was a
definitive factor in shaping of design style:
AmyLee: [T]heres really nothing that looks like RL here, we dont really need to comply with
the rules of building in RL … so we made profit of it 4 .
On the other hand, the workshop projects followed the stylistic and narrative logic of Metrotopia as
they were fictional designs to be presented in the virtual city, while they were smaller in size and
simpler in structure.
The analysis continues with comparative presentation of each design project within each analytical
theme, borrowing and synthesizing certain concepts from the matrix. Each sub-chapter will focus
on one particular meta-function, and discuss the findings from the three case-studies in reference
to the design elements on various scales. The analysis of each meta-function also aims to discuss
the relations between different meta-functions by exemplifying the various situations, in which
these design elements are crated to fulfill multiple functions. Findings on the various scales, such
as layout of the places, organization of functional areas, or use of textures and animations as design
elements aim to support the analysis by providing insights on the semiotic and structural relations
among various scales. Therefore, the categorization of the data within the systemic functional
matrix also aims to transgress the boundaries of meta-functions or rank-scales, and emphasize the
fluidity of concepts in the framing of the overall semiotic experience. I begin with presentation of
data on functionalities and the perceived affordances in each design project and see these as
experiential components. The second part of the analysis outlines the interpersonal meta-function,
and includes the co-designers’ descriptions about their rhetorical intentions and the ways in which
they formed the multimodal semiotic resources to communicate particular messages, amplify
4
As I explained in Chapter 7, AmyLee is deaf. Therefore, she requested our interview to be based on text-chat, after
which I sent her a follow-up survey with open-ended questions. I use her original messages as data, thus some
grammatical mistakes may appear here and there.
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