Multimodal Semiotics and Collaborative Design

in his virtual home, imagining how he could have different types of music in different rooms.
According to Curiza, he came up with this particular type of avatar interaction by when he realized
SL’s affordances to “sub-divide the land” and “put up various music into the land.”
In terms of the actual content-generation process, the presence of avatars may or may not come in
handy, depending of the context of situation. For instance, Aspen from Metrotopia project
mentions that he doesn’t even move or use his avatar during most of the content generation
process and uses the camera-view options to travel around his object. Similarly, AmyLee (PAL)
mentions the idle situation of her avatar while she is thinking about design outside SL as a reason
for her preference to work alone, without intruders who expect interaction. In these situations, the
“in-camera” experience of presence dominates the user interaction where the user’s view is not
limited or obstructed by the avatar, but by the translation of mouse and keyboard actions to camera
movements. In both cases, the preference of working alone and collaborating for specific aspects of
the process significantly shapes the ways in which the co-designers organize the synchronicity of
their tasks.
Figure 7.11. (left) Avatar "Isis" from Venus and the Four Moons group (image from workshop blog)
Figure 7.12. (right) Superhero avatars and villain character “Wasting Man” from Water Avengers group
(image from workshop blog)
For the Workshop students, avatar creation and their integration with the narrative of the overall
design was a pre-requisite, therefore they had to learn the customization interface and search for
inworld avatar-creation resources. The image on the left (Figure 4) shows a close-up image of Isis,
one of the goddesses designed by Venus and the Four Moons group, with the intention of signifying
a particular narrative and building a visual representation of their character. As seen below, the
design of Isis and its certain visual characteristics (name, colors, body features, etc) are
appropriated and meaningfully embedded into their story, which relates their discourse to their
final design. According to the students: “[t]he name Isis has a particular meaning” which
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