Multimodal Semiotics and Collaborative Design

The interpersonal meta-function focuses on the meaning potentials on a more conceptual level, and
reveals the ways in which the visual languages in the design of virtual places have been generated
in reference to other meaning systems through visual metaphors. As some of these metaphors refer
to the fictional genres and real-world urban styles in Metrotopia and the workshop projects, PAL’s
design emphasizes a relatively more open-ended visual experimentation with the building blocks.
The organization of visual and structural elements also determines the various ranks of scale in the
design of virtual places. In different situations within the three cases, different areas were often
reserved for specific social actions, such as fighting, chatting or dancing. The signification of these
social places is often supported by the use of multimodal design elements, such as posters or
scripted objects which inform the visitors about the possible activities.
In my comparative analysis, multimodality is foregrounded as a common shaping feature of the
designed environments, in which user-avatars can experience the VW’s various affordances for
navigation, interaction and digital content creation. I have shown that the co-designers frame and
materialize their rhetorical processes as designed objects, as they modify three-dimensional
geometrical units (prims) and supplement their affordances for user-interaction with auxiliary
modes (i.e. interactivity, animations, light and brightness effects). In most projects, verbal
components, images, video and 3D interactive objects are used as interconnected textual elements
of the overall multimodal arrangements, and various combinations of audio-visual elements such
as colors, textures, geometric forms and spatial organizations are used to express certain
interpersonal meanings. Following this logic, it is also possible to revisit the notion of layout as
mode (Kress and van Leeuwen 2001, van Leeuwen 2005, Kress 2010). Context-bound methods of
appropriating and organizing these design elements are considered as both inwardly and
outwardly productive dimensions of sign-making (Kress 2010). Users’ actions in physical spaces
are translated to the language of the computer via several user-interface devices, and attention is
divided between multiple frames of interaction. It is possible for users to be in multiple ‘places’ at
once, or traverse between various virtual platforms, often transgressing limitations of synchronicity
in time and in their interactions. This ties back to Lemke’s (2005, 2009a , 2009b)
phenomenologically-guided social semiotic theory on chronotopes and heterochrony as framing of
virtual experiences. Therefore, I revise existing models of frequently occurring spatial categories
(ranks of scale) in accordance to multimodal analysis of co-produced designs in the three case
studies, and propose a state-of-the art analytical model for systemic functional analysis of virtual
places and artifacts. The analysis shows that the categorization of virtual places and artifacts in a
rank-scale format is helpful in determining the potential meanings on different levels, whereas it is
possible for any meta-functional category to surpass the boundaries of scale and reveal different
potentials in different situations on different scales of interaction. One example of this is the
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