Multimodal Semiotics and Collaborative Design

Curiza: I told Xavier “Xavier I want a music place where people can come, and it must look
like you can do whatever you like, it must look like 2040 or something. Really futuristic”
It is possible to partially infer Curiza’s position towards representations of ‘futurism and virtuality’
in relation to PAL –which he calls “very non-human” - and SL from his next comment :
Curiza: If I want to create this futuristic music space, then … I can’t mix in nature in that
because it’s on a computer, it’s superficial. So why mix these worlds I mean you can’t smell a
flower, which is one of the things what a flower can be. It can be very beautiful, but you can’t
smell it in there. Of course you can create some magic using plants and stuff like that, but it
had just never been the plan for my sim.
Similar to Metrotopia and PAL, the workshop student designs involved orchestration of various
discursive elements and actors, including images and characters from different mythologies, movie
characters and their re-semiotization as trans-gender personas, and representation of ideological
content through forms, colors and multimodal (verbal/non-verbal) messages. As the groups
followed the pre-constructed narrative framing in Metrotopia, their projects differentiated in terms
of the use of intertextual metaphors as narrative elements. For instance, the Superheroes and
Supervillains group re-created popular figures from fantasy fiction films and developed a design
concept in reference to these stories, whereas the Venus and the Four Moons group’s design
concept and the stories of their avatars as super-heroines reflected the ancient Egyptian mythology,
with the conceptual support of their feminist approach to signification. The students had limited
time and resources, thus they focused on the visual representation of messages rather than
construction of complex interactions. In their final presentations, students presented not only their
objects, but also their stories, their characters and a brief context-definition for illustrating the
problem their project aimed to solve. Within my analytical matrix (table 8.1) construction of such
intertextual representations, and genre frameworks, refer to both interpersonal and experiential
meta-functions. Therefore, the semiotic cohesion of design elements not only affects the aesthetic
style of the overall design, but also shapes the construction of interpersonal meaning potentials in
particular areas for social presence and avatar interaction.
Design of interaction places and signification of social presence
Particular divisions and categorizations of the place often refer to designated areas for avatars to
meet and do things together. Multimodal compositions of meeting places, and artifacts that
constitute these spaces, usually refer to their meaning potentials as interpersonal and experiential
agents. The interpersonal meta-function at this level signifies the meaningful social activities and
the ways in which the co-designers organized the environment to afford communication between
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