Multimodal Semiotics and Collaborative Design

their interest in such metaphors for strengthening the interpersonal aspect of their design was their
lack of proficiency in and access to semiotic resources of SL. Although the design projects were
constructed by using prims, textures, animations and often sound clips, the students had
difficulties to organize the interactive functions. For instance, the students wanted the spaceship to
actually fly and be navigated by avatars, but their attempts to find and use a proper script to make
their objects interactive failed. As a result, (interpersonally) the design is intended to be a
‘spaceship shaped as a lipstick to symbolize feminism’ while (experientially) what they could
produce was a semi-functional model to represent their design concept visually. Therefore,
students emphasized the representational aspects, through which they aimed to also signify the
intended affordances for user interaction:
LUT: It was the combination of power with fire behind, and feministic with the lipstick
RUT: Yes, like two things in one, the power and the beauty. Symbolic things.
AGN: I also liked the texture we put on our spaceship. And the texture of the moon. It really
looked like a real moon …
RUT: it wasn’t a moon texture. It was like a stone or something. But we found it in Metrotopia
(…)
AGN: We just gave it more glow, more shine
Their decisions on the forms and the symbolic characters for expressing their overall message have
an underlying semiotic framing. The problem with visual formulation of hairspray, and the choice
of the form of a lipstick instead, can be considered as a conflict of interpersonal and textual
meanings, the combination of which was intended to have multimodal semiotic coherence. When
students found the rhetorical material to work with, their next challenge was to elaborate their
messages by designing their objects. As explained in the previous chapter, the construction of a
three-dimensional form by using prims as building blocks presents limitations; and these
limitations were principally effective in the students’ design processes.
The superheroes and supervillains group’s (figure 8.4) narrative idea was based on appropriating
popular movie characters and redesign them as supervillains. Their design included a ‘magical jail’
to hold the supervillains, a ‘brainwashing machine’ to symbolically change their attitudes, and a
crane that links these two objects, which was intended to transport avatars from the jail to the
machine but wasn’t functional. As one student from the group mentions, their design concept was
also based on visual metaphors and appropriation of intertextual semiotic associations:
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