Multimodal Semiotics and Collaborative Design

Multimodal place-making and the nexus analysis framework
The multimodal approach provides a systemic model for social semiotic analysis of virtual places
as multimodal texts; while a socio-cultural perspective presents the embedded rhetorical processes
within the designed messages by reviewing designers’ reflections on how and why they made
particular design decisions. Within the multimodal analysis of virtual places and artifacts, I
systematically outline specific experiential, interpersonal and textual features of designs to
compare and discuss the modal configurations and affordances in relation to their rhetorical
contents. On the other hand, modes and their meta-functions should not be considered in isolation,
as the overall aim of the multimodal analysis is to reveal the patterns of semiotic cohesion and
study the dynamic interplay between semiotic resources and their social functions.
If virtual places are framed as multimodal sign systems, then making virtual places should be
considered semiotic work. But, as Krippendorff (1990) claims, designing place in SL is not merely
producing signs, but it involves producing useful and usable artifacts as multimodal arrangements.
In this view, SL can illustrate a complex socio-semiotic network of actors, places and practices that
lead to particular multimodal arrangements in the products of collaborative design. While a social
semiotic optic alone may not be sufficient to explain how and why individuals combine various
semiotic resources in certain arrangements, the poststructuralist socio-cultural approach (Poynton
1993) to systemic functional analysis develops our understanding of the contexts in which people
use the mediational means and the resources for the production of semiotic phenomena.
However, the conventional dichotomy of media producers and users cannot explain the complex
social relations of co-production in SL, and that these relations form dynamic nexuses of designerly
practices. In the case of user-driven development of SL, the platform affords its users’ participation
through not only idea-generation and feedback, but also content generation and distribution.
Therefore, designers in SL are not only brain-workers who generate concepts and the specifications
for production, but they are also builders who make things for other people to experience. In doing
so, they not only conceptualize their ideas by representing them but also build functional models in
which other avatars can interact. In this respect, SL also differs from the user-toolkit approach in
user-driven innovation studies (von Hippel 1976, 2001). As I have shown in the analysis, the codesigners
in SL are usually also the makers of the objects. Even if a member of the design team
chooses not to actively create prims, textures or scripts, the collaborative projects in SL are
organized in certain ways that would allow the individuals to contribute in other ways, including
resource collection, idea generation and testing.
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