Multimodal Semiotics and Collaborative Design

number of participants to perform tasks in virtual space to test their relations to the variables and
context of interaction. They are often considered effective for measuring relationships between
communication sources and their effects on behavior (Deacon et al. 2007). For instance, at
Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab (VHIL), Jeremy Bailenson (2006) and his
colleagues are focusing on social implications of being present in an immersive VR environment
(Blascovich and Bailenson 2011). The projects that are conducted by Bailenson and his colleagues
use quantitative analysis and on-site observations of ‘transformed social interactions’ in CVEs,
where they investigate how designing user-tracking settings for virtual learning or collaborative
building spaces employs the knowledge of social and non-linguistic codes, such as visual and
behavioral realism, as well as characteristics of virtual agents/avatars, such as plasticity or
attractiveness (Bailenson et al. 2004, Bailenson and Yee 2005, Bailenson et al. 2005, Bailenson
and Beall 2006).
A second influential stream in quantitative virtual world studies often focus on longitudinal
analyses of user activities, virtual economies and inworld transactions, and try to reveal the
patterns that could explain how cultures of online worlds are co-created and practiced by
communities. Research studies with such inclination often use statistical data on money exchanges,
forms and practices of transactions, structures of virtual world economies, questions about how
they could affect real world industries, or relations between MMORPG design and large-scale user
behavior (Ip and Jacobs 2004). Edward Castronova’s analyses of virtual economies and online
game industries (Castronova 2005, 2007, Castronova et al. 2007, Castronova et al 2009) is among
the most influential of this type of quantitative research.
Although my overall perspective on the VWs research field is enriched by the findings of such
studies, my qualitative methodology grounds the analysis to a wider range of collaborative
practices within the design process. Drawing on this, I combine the behavioral perspective with the
textual analysis of multimodal designs in order to explain the how and why questions. My
analytical framework aims to explore the co-design activities within their social environments to
include as many environmental factors of the inworld interactions as possible. I analyze the codesigners’
meaning-making processes in one-to-one and small-group interactions to emphasize the
phenomenological experiences of time, space and movement in the construction of places and
artifacts. This is why I rely on qualitative VW studies, particularly in research contexts where
researchers are interested in understanding the nature of social interactions in VWs.
Qualitative VW Research: Social and cultural dimensions of virtual interaction
Qualitative VW studies use various VW platforms as subjects of analyses, and they occasionally use
comparative methods to understand the developments in interactive technologies and theorize
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