Multimodal Semiotics and Collaborative Design

Media technologies determine communication, but only in the first instance – in the negative
sense of deciding which communicative practices are impossible or improbable, and in the
positive sense of presenting affordances that constitute new windows of opportunity.
Affordances are only actualized in steps and stages of social innovation and collaboration
(Jensen 2010: 164).
Therefore, design is considered a social and communicative process, and affordances are the
emergent semiotic potentials, through which designers organize the social environment of
communication. The meaning-oriented design theories mention the unpredictability of design
situations (Buchanan 1992) and the ‘reflexive conversation’ between the designers and the contexts
(Cross 2007 [1990]), which often causes the design problems and the potential solutions to develop
simultaneously (Wisser 2006). Especially in collaborative design cases, where the decisions on
design solutions are based on the negotiations of co-designers, the social semiotic framework to
meaning-making is relevant. Therefore, the analytical framework for the study of collaborative
design in SL considers the dynamic social nature of the design projects, and the situations in which
social relations of meaning and power are interweaved.
The research question
With this brief introduction, some of the central concepts in this study have been addressed. In the
following chapters, the notions of virtual places, multimodality and semiotic potentials, and the
collaborative design practices will be further examined. I use this interdisciplinary theoretical
framework to anchor my analysis in existing research and to give grounds for the analytical
approach and research question. The aim of my analysis is to study the collaborative design and coproduction
in SL as social practices in situated contexts. Therefore, I will ask questions about how
different designers experience collaborative design processes in SL, and how they reflect on
particular affordances and constraints of the platform within their individual and collaborative
practices. In this approach, the overall research question is:
How do the VW users co-produce multimodal meaning potentials in virtual places
and artifacts through collaborative design, as exemplified by the social semiotic
analysis of the three case studies in SL
I suggest a multimodal sign-making oriented research study to analyze the co-design of places as
cultural co-production of messages, where users transform their rhetorical intentions into
experientially, interpersonally and textually semiotized virtual places. Collaborative design in SL is
considered a communicative activity with unique characteristics, problems and solutions. Both the
solutions and the problems of design are pre-conditioned by the socio-technical environments of
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