Place taking as a spatial analytical concept: Extending a social-semiotic multimodal approach to collaborative virtual design

Paper i proceeding, 2026

Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs) are increasingly used to support

early-stage design, yet we still know little about how collaboration is enacted spatially

within these settings. This paper develops ‘place taking’ as an analytical concept within a

social-semiotic approach, using selective excerpts from a collaborative design workshop

as illustrative examples rather than as an empirical case study. The excerpts show how

architects and nurses within a Virtual Collaborative Design Environment (ViCoDE)

negotiate the emerging design through their embodied interactions, their access to shared

representations, and their spatial positions. Drawing on Lefebvre’s triad of perceived,

conceived, and lived space, ‘place taking’ is used to explain how participants’ bodily

orientation, use of tools, and imaginative projections shape who can act and why, whose

knowledge became consequential, and how design futures could be collectively

constructed. The analysis demonstrates that shifts from competitive to collaborative

engagement develops as participants physically reposition themselves, redistribute access

to representations, and reorganise their spatial orientations. The paper extends theories

of embodied co-design and hybrid environments by highlighting spatial mechanisms that

underpin collaborative reasoning in CVEs. We argue that designing future hybrid and

virtual environments requires attention to how interfaces, tools, and spatial arrangements

enable or constrain place taking, and thus shape potential emergence of democratic,

generative collaborative design processes.