Multimodal Semiotics and Collaborative Design

1. Introduction
Virtual places and Second Life cases
Places are complex sign-systems. The construction of a place depends not only on the organization
of objects and visual elements in physical space, but also on the semiotic potentials they present for
meaningful human (inter-)action. When people interpret and respond to the discourses in places
by participating in the social world, they also transform the social contexts in which spaces become
semiotized. Therefore, the affordances and constraints of the socially available tools and resources
for (co-)production and circulation of mediated discourses affect the characteristics of potential
social actions that are enabled by certain places. Places not only represent particular affordances
and constraints for various social actions, but also bear traces of the socio-cultural and the
technological environments in which they come to being as useful and meaningful signs.
In this respect, virtual worlds (VWs) are also places. Virtual places represent, and in many ways
simulate the three-dimensional spatial experiences and provide their users with various social
affordances to use and co-produce these communicative environments. Previous research has
shown that people often tend to interpret virtual places and artifacts in ways influenced by their
physical counterparts, and they choose to behave in certain ways comparable to real-world 1
behavior 2 . On the other hand, VWs are not physical spaces in which human bodies and physical
objects interact; but they are multimodal interactive representations of spatial phenomena that are
appropriated into the virtual realm. Therefore, virtual places represent their makers' rhetorical
intentions, and the ways in which they imagine the users to experience the places of a VW.
Second Life (SL) is a VW made of connected places that are aimed at avatar interaction and
designed by processes of co-production. It is a digital platform that exemplifies how these so-called
'worlds' are co-produced by their users as interconnected virtual places and artifacts. Users of SL
often form small-to-large groups of avatars to build virtual places for their collective purposes, to
express their aesthetic talents, and to participate in collaborative projects which offer new
mediated experiences to SL users. SL provides these content designers certain tools and resources
to generate the places and artifacts, or to import certain assets from other digital platforms.
1
I use the term ’real-world’ cautiously, as I consider the interactions in SL as a part of the so-called real world. The fact
that user actions are digitized and translated in VWs do not make them any less real than interacting with a computer,
sitting on an actual chair, or forming wood to make a chair. In the following chapter on social semiotics and
multimodality, I will further discuss my perspective on the real-virtual dichotomy.
2
In the following chapters, I will discuss some of these works; for instance the notion of ’transformed social interaction’
(i.e. Bailenson et al. 2004, Bailenson and Yee 2005, Bailenson et al. 2005, Bailenson and Beall 2006), place metaphors
(Prasolova-Førland 2008), and the ways in which the design of virtual places can be affected by the metaphors of
everyday life (i.e. Book 2004, Taylor 2009).
1