Multimodal Semiotics and Collaborative Design

ackdrop for the understanding of user practices in mediated places, I specifically focus on coproduction
of meaning potentials through collaborative design.
Research on design collaboration in virtual worlds
The user-generated VWs afford a shared virtual environment for synchronous design collaboration,
where “designers are physically remote but virtually co-located as avatars within their design
representation in the form of a 3D model” (Gu et al. 2011: 270). Therefore, such 3D worlds are
thought to facilitate higher levels of design communication and representation, mainly because of
their multimodal communication cues that produce an awareness of the nearby designer(s) and
their actions in three-dimensional space. The digital technology enables co-designers to perceive
and use shared design representations through new interactions with the digital models (Gu et al.
2011). As mentioned above, such collaborative actions may require new ways of spatial thinking
and behavior (i.e. use of avatars and navigating via interfaces), especially when designers have
different preferences and responses to different modes of design representations (i.e. 2D sketching
and 3D modeling).
Interaction design researchers Greg Wadley and Nicolas Ducheneaut (2009) focus on the
mechanics of user collaboration via avatars in virtual space, and on how a group of virtual world
users communicate and collaboratively create required geometries by given components. They
classify the two levels of the sense presence in Second Life as ‘in-avatar’ and ‘in-camera’, which
points to an important characteristic of the VW; and results in new challenges such as not being
able to understand where your group member’s camera is focused and not being able to
communicate on specific objects/parts because of disorientation. Their work also reveals the role of
the detachable camera in user experience and orientation in collaborative working. By providing
designers with modular components of a pre-designed form to re-assemble, Wadley and
Ducheneaut (2009) exclude the extensive use of the inventory, collection of resources from various
platforms. While their findings are significant for showing how verbal and non-verbal references
(i.e. visually marking positions, pointing with editing functions, marking places with avatars) are
used for spatial functions such as navigation and orientation, they choose to single out a limited
part of the design process, and do not involve the social aspects.
I intend to broaden the context of inquiry to include how users collaboratively generate content by
involving the variety of socially available resources during the process. Unlike Wadley and
Ducheneaut, my focus is not only on how user-designers perform given tasks, but how they
collaboratively generate ideas, and produce virtual places and artifacts as emerging meaning
systems. This perspective includes the mechanics of collaboration as an important element, for
which Wadley and Ducheneaut’s study is a valuable resource. On the other hand my main purpose
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