Invitation to Ph.D. defense
Friday November 9, 2012 at 13.00 – 16.00 in room 42-2.37
Remzi Ateş Gürşimşek defends his thesis:
Multimodal Semiotics and Collaborative Design A social semiotic approach to the co-production of virtual places and artifacts in Second Life Abstract: This study aims to explore the user-driven co-production of the places and artifacts for avatar interaction in the virtual world known as Second Life. The theoretical framework combines the social semiotic theory with perspectives from design research to analyze the multifaceted contexts of co-design activities, and the perceived affordances and constraints of the collaborative platform. I propose a multimodal social semiotic framework to analyze the construction of meaning potentials in virtual places and artifacts by three cases of collaborative design. The case-studies include observations and interviews with the co-designers of an interdisciplinary virtual laboratory, a virtual social place for live events and streaming music, and a 3-week communication and design workshop at Roskilde University. The methodological framework foregrounds systemic multimodal analyses of the virtual places and artifacts as central foci, while I consider the social actors, the places and the interaction orders of co-production practices as contextual data. Two interrelated social dimensions of semiotic co-production are emphasized: (1) analysis of the digitally mediated collaborative design processes through which places and artifacts are produced, and (2) analysis of multimodal discourses that are reflected in the experiential, interpersonal and textual meaning potentials of the designs. My conclusions emphasize the importance of individual and collective sense-makings in co-production of multimodal phenomena, in terms of both the perceived affordances and constraints of available tools and the semiotic potentials of co-designed places.
Assessment Committee Robin Teigland Jim Ang Francesco Lapenta
Associated professor, Stockholm School of Economics, SE (chairman) Associated professor, School of Engineering and Digital Arts, UK Associated professor, CBIT, Roskilde University, DK
Head of defense Keld Bødker
Head of Doctoral School, CBIT, Roskilde University, DK
Supervisor Sisse Siggaard Jensen
Professor, CBIT, Roskilde University, DK
Thesis is available for examination at Roskilde University Library
After the defense CBIT will host a reception Roskilde Universitet, Institut for Kommunikation Virksomhed og Informationsteknologier
berri@ruc.dk