Multimodal Semiotics and Collaborative Design

Although Metrotopia was specifically designed for the participants of Caitlyn’s research, the design
team was also considering SL’s social affordances, which would allow the virtual city to be
populated by various other avatars; thus the team chose to make Metrotopia a public location and
to allow other visitors in. Caitlyn expresses later that she “wasn’t thinking about other people,
other visitors” and first design principles were determined “just for the participants of the study.”
In our interview, Caitlyn mentioned that Metrotopia “existed primarily to bring people to for a
specific reason” and her research participants are a “different type of audience than the audience
you hope to get just by existing.” However, particular design elements have also been placed in the
overall design to accommodate the variety of visitor profiles, including random visitors and guests
for various inworld events. After Caitlyn’s research study - when the primary purpose of the design
was accomplished – Metrotopia was introduced to public and several events were organized to
“market” the city, including a Machinima contest and an opening night with live concerts.
Therefore, the design of Metrotopia’s experiential meaning potentials reflect this situation, and the
organization of various design elements aim to accommodate different visitor experiences.
Although specific interactive places were designed and built within Metrotopia to represent
particular types of interaction (i.e. information gathering, costume and avatar modification,
fighting and exercising), certain locations did not satisfy the initial research expectations of Caitlyn.
She believes that the design didn’t involve enough ‘questions’ to get participants more engaged:
Caitlyn: It is this idea of the questionings that go on in a situation. First question is ‘what is
this place’, and then you get that question answered but you do not have any questions after
that, you are not going to stick around. (…) But then as a designer, of the content at least, you
CAN structure questions in. I mean, that is what happens with narrative text. There are a lot
of questions as you go along. So, we didn’t structure enough questions into the city to make it
interesting enough to stay.
In her comment above, Caitlyn relates the questionings of the users, or visitors, to the decisions
that are made by the designers. Here, she explains why she thinks her experience with the research
participants was not as successful as she thought, by referring to both the experiential potentials
for movement and the interpersonal potentials for engagement. On the one hand, it is the visitors
who would make sense of the place; therefore their questionings about the possible affordances
and/or constraints was the primary steering force behind the design of certain elements. On the
other hand, Caitlyn claims that designers’ task is to shape the users’ environment in such a way that
would make them want to ask more questions and therefore have prolonged interaction.
In Metrotopia, the co-designers present experiential meaning potentials by organizing the
affordances and constraints of various design elements within specific locations in the city. Each of
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