Multimodal Semiotics and Collaborative Design

environments, augmented reality, location-specific computing and the new forms of social
practices that evolve through their use. Drawing on their 10-year-old analyses of place and placemaking
with digital technologies, Dourish (2006) also argues that growth in both the connectivity
and processing powers of computers resulted in the emergence of immersive virtual environments
in which avatar embodiments share the same graphical world, and design of location-specific
technologies via mobile devices for specific places (Messeter 2009).
For Harrison and Dourish’s (1996) CSCW 14 -oriented analysis, certain affordances of the so-called
“real-world” can be applied to the virtual domain as spatial models, including relational
orientation and reciprocity, proximity and action, partitioning, presence and awareness. In their
understanding, “designers can exploit our familiarity with the spatial organization of our everyday
physical environments [;] in particular, they wish to exploit the ways that space structures and
organizes activity and interaction” (Harrison and Dourish 1996: 68). Harrison and Dourish’s
(1996) analysis is partly a result of the ”spatial turn in computing” and the emergence of
collaborative working systems for offices in 1990s (Messeter 2009), which provide a fruitful yet
limited scope. It is possible to claim that such analyses from mid- and late 1990s would provide
only limited insights, as they have been under critical scrutiny parallel to the evolution of
technologies and socio-cultural practices. The place-oriented CSCW perspective of Harrison and
Dourish (1996) has been criticized to rely too much on the distinction between the object and
meaning, and the dichotomy of real and virtual worlds (Messeter 2009). However, their analyses of
place in earlier collaborative working systems show remarkable similarities with the multimodal
framework of my research, in which different modes such as image, sound and video are
considered as interrelated parts of particular unifying semiotic functions.
It’s very easy to blindly talk about “audio and video” in media spaces as if they were equivalent
media, performing the same sort of function. However, when we take the place-centric view—
and as we have seen, it’s the place-centric view which affects how people communicate and
behave—then we can see that audio and video actually provide very different sorts of functions
(Harrison and Dourish 1996: 73).
In fact, Harrison and Dourish’s (1996) earlier analysis considers place generally as a space with
something added, while Dourish’s (2006) later analysis of the contemporary CSCW systems points
to the limitations of this “layer-cake” model of understanding space and place and argues that
space is as much socially constructed as place. As new technologies are introduced to societies, they
do not only change the ways in which the users socialize but also their spatial practices, and the
ways in which they understand and develop spatialities. Drawing on French cultural theorist
14
Short for: Computer Supported Cooperative Work
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