Multimodal Semiotics and Collaborative Design

Michael de Certeau’s (1984) analysis of a Walk in the City, Dourish emhasizes the role of spatial
practices in the making of the sense of place, and the importance of both space and place models in
design of collaborative systems. De Certau argues that spatial practices are in fact social
negotiations between “strategic” and “tactical” spatial practices, in which strategies of power and
control conflicts the ways people individually and collectively use and produce spaces. In this
respect, “de Certau’s space is a practiced space” (Messeter 2009: 37). For de Certau, “to walk is to
lack a place. It is the indefinite process of being absent and in search of a proper” (de Certau
1984:103)
Strategic practices can be considered as practices of design, whereas tactical practices are the
practices of use (Dourish 2006). Similar to the nexus of practice perspective in MDA (Scollon
2001), Dourish (2006) emphasizes the multitude of personal and social experiences that constitute
the feeling of place exist in the form of a network of many spatial systems. The focus on spatial
practices brings de Certau’s and Harrison and Dourish’s ideas together with those of
phenomenologists (i.e. Tuan1977, Lemke 2002, 2005, Turner and Turner 2004) and LeFebvre’s
(1991) Marxist framing of power relations and production of social spaces. In fact, both Harrison
and Dourish (1996) and Dourish (2006) defend meaning as a collective product, and collective
production of the meaningfulness of places and spaces as a social process.
My purpose is to develop the multimodal systemic-functional model of social semiotics to the
analysis of virtual places and artifacts, and use the multimodal analysis of meaning potentials to
explore the socio-technical contexts in which co-design and co-production practices take place.
There are two main reasons why I believe such a socio-technical approach to the semiotic analysis
is necessary to understand the complexity of multimodal semiotic potentials. The systemic
functional analysis can help us analyze the experiential, interpersonal and textual meaning
potentials that are embedded as multimodal discourses by negotiating actors, including the codesigners
and visitors. Furthermore, the analysis of co-design practices and the means by which
modes are organized to represent, orient and organize semiotic resources also help us understand
the ways in which multimodal discourses are produced.
3.4. Systemic functional framework and multimodal sign systems
Multimodal analysis of semiotic entities is based on systemically outlining the potential social
functions of objects in relation to their contexts of use, and the affordances of the environment in
which communication takes place. The systemic functional approach to analyzing sign systems,
and formulation of their meaning potentials as socio-semiotic meta-functions were developed
primarily by linguists Michael A.K. Halliday (1978, 2007) and Ruqaiya Hasan (Halliday and Hasan
63