Multimodal Semiotics and Collaborative Design

The workshop projects and construction of objects for avatar interaction
In the four workshop projects (figures 8.3 to 8.6.), the students practiced to use the GUI, create
avatars, navigate, socialize and produce content in SL. The four groups of international students
worked together both online and offline in order to design and produce virtual artifacts to
communicate their social messages. As mentioned in Chapter 7, these four projects were designed
as collaborative team-work during an intensive three-week workshop. The students were
introduced to various resources beforehand to provide them with a richer solution space for
building content in SL. They were also asked to accomplish smaller building tasks before they were
engaged in their overall projects, by which we intended to familiarize them with various aspects of
user interaction in SL. However, student groups’ design projects also lacked particular experiential
and textual features – in comparison to the other two cases, mainly because of the time limitations,
and the frustrations by the steep learning-curve, as experienced by the students. Therefore, the
workshop projects also show certain differences in rank-of-scale.
During the workshop, students were presented a fictional scenario based on a disaster which awaits
the world in 2050. They were asked to design virtual places and artifacts in Metrotopia to find a
solution to the imaginary problem. Details of the story were intentionally left open-ended for each
group to determine their own problem-spaces. The collaborative working environment for students
was the Sandbox/Park in Metrotopia; therefore group projects were limited in terms of size.
The first group project that I analyze (figure 8.3.) was produced by the group ‘Venus and the Four
Moons’. This group’s scenario included four female deities visiting Earth (or SL) as Superheroes,
and their fight to save the earth from male domination. The group’s conceptualization of the
solution space was highly influenced by gender politics. As students reflected in the focus group
interview, their primary objective in choosing their visual style was to ‘symbolize feminism’.
LUT: At first we were thinking about designing a hairspray. Like some kind of poison
(…)
RUT: [W]e thought it won’t look really like a hair spray. People won’t understand it. Then we
came up with the lipstick idea (…) it could look like other kinds of chemicals or something, not
really a hairspray. So, we thought that the lipstick would be more symbolic (…) only women
have these lipsticks.
As shown in Figure 8.3, the three-dimensional form of a lipstick was the foundation for their visual
expression of their messages. The use of metaphors for symbolic expression of underlying
rhetorical messages was also a commonly method used by the other student groups. One reason for
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