Multimodal Semiotics and Collaborative Design

How are places and artifacts for avatar interaction co-designed and co-produced by
the users of virtual worlds, as exemplified by a multimodal and social semiotic
analysis of three case studies in SL
The main focus is on their reflections on the (perceived) affordances and constraints of SL for their
context-specific collaborative design purposes, and the ways in which they define the
materialization of affordances and constraints as meaning and action potentials in their designs.
Therefore, the analytical objectives are two-fold: first, I aim to inquire the social actors and the
(virtual and physical) places of collaborative design projects. Then, I analyze the interaction orders
within the design processes, and how the social actors’ (co-designers’) conditions of engaging
shapes the ways in which they experience the collaborative practices. Finally, a central analytical
dimension is the multimodal analysis of virtual places and artifacts, where I discuss the
experiential, interpersonal and textual meaning potentials of the designs in reference to the
(co-)designers’ interpretations.
The conclusions in general refer to a dynamic nexus of actors, places and practices in coproduction
of virtual places and artifacts. The designs reflect their (co-)designers’ rhetorical
intentions, and various negotiations on the meaning potentials. Not only the actors and their social
histories (i.e. motivations, skills, and resources) may differ, but also do their ways of understanding
what a VW is and what can be done by their use. I use the multimodal analysis perspective to
produce a hyper-textual matrix of semiotic modes, and the dynamic interplay between their
experiential, interpersonal and textual functions as various design elements. I inquire their
motivations, competences and conditions of engaging through the MDA perspective, which reveals
underlying social contexts of the divergences and convergences in (co-)designers’ sense-makings.
My conclusions also refer to the emergence of meaning potentials through creative use of modal
affordances in the designs, and their manifestations in the practical functions, structural
organizations and visual forms of collaboratively designed places and artifacts.
The analysis aims to contribute primarily to the communication research field, but also to several
relevant fields including design research, perspectives on digital creativity, and user-generated
content in VWs. My goal is to propose a genuine systemic functional model to study virtual places
and artifacts as multimodal sign systems, and their co-production as a social semiotic process of
designing meaningful arrangements of function, form and structure. In terms of methodology, I
aim to contribute to the discussions on the shortcomings of the systemic functional framework, and
present a socio-culturally conscious and ethno-methodologically supported empirical account of
sign-making in social contexts within the field of VWs.
278