Multimodal Semiotics and Collaborative Design

collaborative actions that span quite different environments with quite different types of agency,
possible acts, and consequences” (Keating and Sunakawa 2010: 331). Their findings show that
participation cues in online games requires new habits of spatial reasoning, which are often fairly
influenced by the cultural and social contexts in which participants collaborate.
Being able to manipulate and interpret continually shifting participant roles and spatial
configurations and being adaptable in the use of the modality of space is a significant part of
interacting across real space and technologically mediated space, with new shared elements of
social life (Keating and Sunakawa 2010: 353).
In terms of the social VWs such as SL, transfer of spatial codes from the so-called real-world has a
central importance in the analysis of designer practices. As Betsy Book (2004) claims, usergenerated
social worlds tend to be ‘more directly influenced and inspired by cultures of everyday
offline life’ as residents constantly draw from existing resources and conventions of entertainment
media and pop culture. User-driven co-production activities in Second Life are often initiated by
similar creative explorations of users with different motivations and individually meaningful
contexts (Dennhardt and Kohler 2010, Kohler et. al. 2009, Ondrejka 2005). Therefore, the
following section will continue to discuss issues such as co-presence, collaboration and co-design in
SL. Before discussing these issues, I will briefly summarize the first part of the review and draw the
main analytical points from the VW literature thus far.
Synthesis: Virtual place-making, architecture and design
In summary, various perspectives on virtual worlds focus on the spatial characteristics of avatar
interaction in VWs, and emphasize the social dimension of place-making in terms of construction
of the meaningful user experience. These perspectives contribute to the formulation of my research
question, as my multimodal social semiotic framing of communication considers design as not only
the construction of visual characteristics of places and artifacts, but also their social functions as
meaningful sign systems, and their practical functions as mediational means. The question is how
virtual places and artifacts in SL are co-designed and co-produced for multimodal interaction;
therefore I often employ spatial categories of place-making in my analysis of virtual places that are
comparable to these approaches. In the following section, my review continues with research
studies on the social dimensions of being together and co-producing virtual objects in a VW.
2.2. Research on co-presence, co-production and co-design in virtual worlds
Although the development and study of virtual worlds are (relatively) recent phenomena, which
originates from the early/mid-1990s and are mainly driven by the socio-technical developments of
the era, researchers have been extensively investigating various aspects of online communication,
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