Multimodal Semiotics and Collaborative Design

For Caitlyn, the major advantage of working in a virtual platform is about the affordances if
presents in comparison to real-world design in terms of the limitations of time and waste of
materials. She says if a similar spatial design project were to be conducted in the physical world
where she is “concerned about wasting materials”, she might have “gone with an earlier design
and just lived with it.” However, working with virtual materials in a virtual environment gave
Caitlyn and the design team the freedom to “keep tinkering with it until you get it exactly the way
you want.” Aspen mentions the real-time collaboration affordances in construction of particular
places. For Aspen, “one of the great things about SL is that we can actually make changes while
we talk about them.” He relates the efficacy of this type of working to idea-generation and conceptdevelopment
processes, where the co-designers often use various modes to communicate with each
other, test their ideas and modify the designs. Such collaborative practices were visible especially
during the construction of the Costume Bazaar and the Museum. In both cases, avatars of the codesigners
met in the said locations, discussed the overall layout and design of the places, and
worked on the placement of various design elements while making final decisions about particular
design requirements. This method requires spatial organization and temporal synchronization of
social practices for a certain amount of time. On the other hand, when the co-designers work on
their own schedules, the temporal mode of working is asynchronous. As Caitlyn states, their
interactions with Aspen during the design process were based on a sequential development: “He
[Aspen] would be creating something and then he’d show it to me [Caitlyn], and I would say if I
agree or if I disagree. If I disagree, [I say] what I think has to be done. And then he would make
another change, and then he’d show that to me. If I’d like that one, I‘d give it a go and be okay
with it.” Throughout this 3 month interaction process, Caitlyn thinks “the content generation for
the museum, the costume bazaar, and figuring out the BOTs, and the decoration of the city” were
the most challenging and time-consuming features, as these were the cases when they “had to
communicate the most.” According to Aspen, design of the Museum was the most challenging, as
he had to spend more than double the time than he has expected for organizing the exhibition. For
designing the overall layout of the city, the design and research teams met at the university, made a
sketch of the parcels and divided the streets in order to locate the provisional interaction spaces.
These sketches allowed the co-designers to visualize their thoughts during both concept generation
and development stages. While the purpose of sketching out maps was a more spatial one in
concept-development, the second map was prepared by the team was focusing on placements, sizes
and ratios of each design element in relation to each other and the surrounding environments.
Caitlyn describes the second map as a “more geographic style map“, which “gives a sense of size
as well because you can get a sense as to where the places are relative to each other and how
much of a space you need to put them all in to place with each other.” After each meeting, the
maps were photographed, and the co-designers began working at their own places to develop the
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