Multimodal Semiotics and Collaborative Design

8.3. Constructing the interpersonal meta-functions: visual style, social
presence and the transformative agency of visitor feedback
I have already mentioned several cases in which the interpersonal meta-functions within the
designed places and artifacts are related to their experiential meaning potentials. In this section,
my aim is to discuss the ways of constructing interpersonal semiotic potentials to communicate
with the visitors about particular design concepts, and the ways in which the design of virtual
places and artifacts mediate communication by emphasizing a sense of social presence. I analyze
how the co-designers of collaborative projects choose to employ some metaphors while avoiding
others, and build their discourses in reference to the intertextual visual languages of various
genres; in that, they consider semiotic references to various other sign-systems. Then, my focus
shift to the design of interaction places, and how their interpersonal meaning potentials are
constructed in order to facilitate co-presence and social interaction. Finally, I will outline some codesigner
comments on how the visitors react to the intended interpersonal potentials, particularly
cases where visitors build inadvertent associations with the place or expectations about its
affordances and constraints. In this section and onwards, I will structure the analysis in terms of
several analytical concepts and discuss the findings from the three cases in reference to each these
concepts in the sub-sections, instead of categorizing the findings for each case study separately.
Design of visual styles, genres conventions and intertextual metaphors
As mentioned earlier, Metrotopia was designed to fulfill a practical function in Caitlyn’s research
experiment. Her reasoning behind design principles for the sim followed an intertextual path in
relation to her goals in using SL as part of a larger media context for research. Signifiers as design
elements in Metrotopia often refer to major tropes of superhero genre, in accordance with the sim’s
overall design which reflects American metropolitan structures with high-rise buildings, USstandard
street lines and English as common language. Although the characteristics of the chosen
genre have common fictional elements (i.e. costumes, superpowers, fighting) with the general
’fantasy’ genre, Caitlyn claims Superheroes were “easier to replicate in SL’ because ‘it has a little bit
more basis in modern world’.
Caitlyn: [T]here are definitely movies that are superhero movies. There are video games that
are superhero games. There are, well at the time there was only one real superhero MMORPG,
there’s a couple more now. But what to do in SL
Next challenge for the co-designers was to find proper semiotic resources and appropriate them to
the overall design to reflect it semiotic meta-functions. This part was done as a collaborative effort,
whereas Caitlyn made most of the final decisions as to which tropes relate to the genre style.
214