Multimodal Semiotics and Collaborative Design

Further directions for research
The analysis primarily focused on creative activities and designers’ interpretations of meaning
potentials, as well as their experiences with and feedback gained from the visitors. One limitation
of the rhetorical perspective – as applied in this research – is the limitation of including the other
voices that construct the social framing of communication, particularly the emergent discourses of
the visitors (as sign-users). A promising next step would be to observe how designers’ rhetorical
intentions and presentation of meta-functions meet/match with user behaviors. The question of
how other platforms afford and/or constrain collaborative design activities remains. Future
research studies can use and emphasize the potentials of emerging technologies such as mobile
devices, mixed or augmented reality applications and open-source co-creation platforms. In doing
so, prospective research approaches can explain how technological characteristics of media
platforms and devices affect the collaborative activities and the forms of signification in virtual
designs. One particularly interesting research question would be ‘what happens to 3D content
when it gets natively embedded in Web browsers 3 and widely used by WWW communities’ Such
questions require the considerations of a wider and more complex media landscape, and emphasize
the importance of conditions and contexts in which collaborative activities take place. In general,
the user-driven co-production of places and artifacts in VWs can refer to numerous relevant
perspectives on multimodality in digital media. Another similar approach can focus on the role of
immersive technologies - such as virtual reality - and location specific mixed-reality applications -
such as augmented reality – on collaborative design practices. These research frameworks can
consider professional designers (i.e. architects, product designers, urban designers) and their
collaborative design practices, prospective users in participatory design cases, or students in their
learning environments. Either target group would provide different sets of insights on how the
meaningful relations with virtual places and artifacts are constructed in relation to the affordances
and constraints; thus contribute to the further development of the framework I present in this
study. This PhD dissertation is an attempt to capture the semiotic complexity of virtual places and
artifacts, and offer a new– a meaning and design oriented - perspective on user-generated content
to understand the social life of meaning in VWs. These potentials will only be revealed in the hands
of innovative designers, entrepreneurs and researchers.
3
By being ’natively embedded’ I refer to emerging 3D visualization technologies such as Khronos Group’s WebGL. WebL
and other open standards aim to enable Web browsers to render and present 3D content without the need for
downloading and installing an external plug-in. Currently, WebGL is supported by several browsers such as Google
Chrome, Opera and Mozilla Firefox, while Microsoft’s Internet Explorer does not. Other formats that enable 3D
visualization in browsers include Unity Web plug-in and other Flash-based applications.
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