Multimodal Semiotics and Collaborative Design

mediated social interaction with others through their avatars. He categorizes three dimensions of
“presence, co-presence and connected presence” that constitute the mediated communication
experience through the feelings of self-presence, presence of and with others, and awareness of the
virtual environments in which social interactions take place. In fact, the concepts of presence and
co-presence are closely related to the notions of avatars and representation of bodies in virtual
space. Schroeder also discusses the modalities of communication that are often included CVEs,
including not only the verbal modes of communication such as speech and text, but also non-verbal
aspects such as avatar appearance, gestures and performances in virtual space. Although he
emphasizes the role of “nontechnical” aspects of interaction as more important than the “technical
ones”, theoretical arguments on how affordances can be defined and observed, how they are
constructed by individual and social processes, and how their perception could change through
learning and use are not discussed in detail. Nonetheless, by following Schroeder’s analysis of
context-specific affordances and limitations, it is possible to analyze possible contexts of use and
affordances which enable co-designers to collaborate on their tasks. What makes Schroeder's
(2011) analysis about avatars and virtual space significant is the emphasis on the importance of
visual landscape or built environment, and the extent to which nonverbal communication and
interaction can take place by the affordances (and limitations) provided by the VW (Gürsimsek
2012). In fact, this aspect of CVEs also places them at the center of my analytical framework, as
certain affordances of SL make it useful for collaborating on spatial tasks. Following Schroeder, I
emphasize particular affordances for users to navigate, communicate, co-create and modify virtual
objects, and discuss the current research literature on affordances and constraints in design theory
to support the analysis of the findings from the three case studies.
In the following section, I will illustrate some of the other significant theoretical perspectives and
methodological strategies to reflect on the applied research methodology of my analysis. Although
the overall framework is based on qualitative research, quantitative VW research literature is often
found useful to strengthen the analysis, and provide a wider perspective of the subject matter for
grounding theoretical statements derived from case studies (Eisenhardt 1989).
Quantitative VW research: Lab experiments and longitudinal studies
Two major tendencies in quantitative approaches underpin the perspectives on collaboration and
co-production in virtual environments: (1) experimental studies that focus on certain aspects (or
variables) of user interaction and theorize on the findings of an iterative observation process, and
(2) longitudinal studies which observe long-term social practices in a larger scale and theorize
mostly on statistical data. Experimental approaches usually define particular variables and
conditions that are explicitly specified and manipulated, and they employ a (relatively) large
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