Multimodal Semiotics and Collaborative Design

three case studies. This chapter also includes the construction of the conceptual matrix that I have
produced in order to categorize and theorize the findings from multimodal analysis. Finally, the
chapter on methodologies presents my perspective on issues concerning reflexivity, limitations and
the intended methodological contributions of this analysis.
In the following two chapters, which form the Analysis section, I present and analyze findings from
the three case studies and focus on certain analytical categories to guide the overall discussions in
the final chapter.
The seventh chapter presents findings on the social contexts of collaborative design projects. Here,
I focus on three aspects: the social actors who participate in or contribute to the collaborative
design projects, the mediational means that are utilized by the co-designers to contribute to their
processes, and the processes by which virtual places and artifacts are materialized in SL. First, I
outline the personal profiles of the co-designers, and my observations on the power relations in
collaborative design teams. With reference to the analysis of the three cases, I exemplify my
arguments by discussing how professional researchers and inworld 5 designers worked together in
the building of a virtual laboratory, how students with no previous experience from virtual worlds
learned how to use SL together, and how avatar-based anonymous friendships in SL turned into a
team of builders working together for many years. The analysis of the mediational means deals
with the perceived affordances and constraints of SL, and its socially available tools for
collaborative design, to systematically analyze the ways in which they affect the collaborative
design processes and the products of design. Here, I analyze the graphical user interfaces and the
specific tools for content generation in SL, as well as the semiotic and material resources that are
socially available. My purpose in including the role of tools and resources in the analysis is to
employ the ‘place semiotics’ perspective (Scollon and Scollon 2003) and review the meaning
potentials in relation to the socio-technical contexts of their co-production. In the third sub-section
of this chapter, the findings about the collaborative design processes are presented and analyzed. I
present the social organizations of collaborative projects in all three case studies, and analyze the
ways in which the co-designers chose to work together, by organizing their movements in time and
space. I often refer to Jay Lemke’s (2005, 2009a, 2009b) use of the notions ‘chronotope’ and
‘heterochrony’ to explain how collaborative practices are performed as movement between socially
meaningful places and in heterogeneous time-scales. The empirical examples present the
observations and interview-responses on several stages of the process, including the generation of
5
Inworld is a term that is widely used in virtual worlds literature (and practice) to denote activities that takes place
within the virtual worlds of SL. I often use this term to differentiate these activities from the online ones, which would
include use of Web browsers or other software instead of SL’s viewer GUI.
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