Multimodal Semiotics and Collaborative Design

placement of various interactive locations and objects within Metrotopia aimed at helping the
visitors with orientation and interaction with the sim. In the interview data, most of the codesigners
relate these decisions to the intended use-contexts of potential visitors and users.
An important notion that I emphasized throughout the previous chapters was convergence in
terms of both socially-available semiotic resources and mediated practices of social actors using
various media platforms, tools and modes. The analysis of the collaborative design processes shows
that using SL as a collaborative platform to design and produce content does not necessarily limit
user practices with inherent affordances and constraints of SL but converges with a wider
landscape of mediated communication and co-production. Co-design practices often involve a
variety of online and offline platforms within designers’ reach to work on their ideas and search for
shared inspirations, semiotic and/or material resources. Therefore, it is possible to discuss all the
aforementioned semiotic dimensions as nexus of practices, and use the analytical matrix as
hypertext to choose and combine various semiotic associations in making of multimodal
experience.
The overall synthesis of the findings within this section are summarized in Table 8.3. When reading
this table, it is important to remember that the meta-functions operate conjointly. I do not consider
one meta-function without considering its relations to others within the design. Modes operate on
experiential, interpersonal and textual dimensions, and multimodal coherence of designed objects
and places refers to their various arrangements by the co- designers for intended use-contexts,
reflecting the co-designers’ interests in participating in communicating through design. Various
discourses converge and diverge in shaping rhetorical intentions as design processes, as the codesigners
and (potential) users engage in the design in different conditions and situations. Design
process gives shape to potential affordances and constraints, which are actualized by users. The
multimodal analysis of the three collaborative cases in SL shows that there is a dynamic interplay
between the places and artifacts in SL, and the socio-technical environments in which they are
produced. In the creation of particular semiotic and visual functions, the co-designers in
collaborative projects consider not only the affordances of the platform but also the social
environment in which other people will be getting engaged in it and experience its semiotic
potentials.
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