Multimodal Semiotics and Collaborative Design

design can also operate as a semiotic resource. The virtual places and artifacts that are co-created
in SL also bear particular modal affordances and constraints, as the co-designers organize the
environment of communication to facilitate particular social actions while limit others. To sum up,
modes are created, used and transformed according to the communicative and representational
needs of societies, and semiotic requirements of the context of situation. As Kress (2010: 87) states:
“What a community decides to use and regard as a mode is a mode.” My particular aim in adopting
the multimodal perspective is to inquire how SL’s social world allows and/or hinders the
emergence of particular modes in collaborative design.
Multimodality in Digital Media
Digital technology is considered as a “multimodal social semiotic technology”, which provides “a
common platform for semiotic resources to combine and unfold in new and innovative ways”
(O’Halloran in press: 4). Media, on the other hand, is defined by Kress and van Leeuwen as “[the]
material resources used in the production of semiotic products and events” (Kress and van
Leeuwen 2001: 22), including both the materials and the tools used. For the systemic functional
analysis of digital communication media, multimodality presents a methodological approach and
an epistemological framework for understanding the affordances and constraints of digital media.
The three features of contemporary media landscape characterize the social semiotic
understanding of transformation in social practices within and between media: “(a) forms of
knowledge production; (b) forms and principles of text-making composition; and (c) social and
semiotic blurring: the dissolution, abolition, disappearance of frames and boundaries” (Kress 2010:
23).
For O’Halloran (in press), the systemic functional/multimodal approach to digital communication
is innovative because it emphasizes the relations between semiosis, text and context in order to
reveal the individual, social and cultural patterns for meaning-making. As the digital
communication technologies develop, a growing multiplicity of modes and modal arrangements are
becoming available for online communication, as well as new affordances for participation and
collaboration. On the other hand, analyzing multimodal meaning resources for co-production of
digital technologies also presents several limitations, including the complexity of analysis and
dynamic nature of media texts. For Lemke (2009b), hyper-textual construction of the Web offers
users with many possible sequences of interaction, the coherence of which depend on both
thematic (presentational), structural and dialogic relations. By doing so, the hyper-text affords its
users to “generate trajectories (…) which are themselves a new kind of multimodal syntagm”
(Lemke 2009b: 291). Therefore, notions such as production and authorship must be re-explored
and re-theorized to comply with the new forms of expression and social practices, such as the cut-
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