Multimodal Semiotics and Collaborative Design

and posters with positive political messages, and the multi-colored scripted dance floor. The visual
style essentially refers to a multimodal experience centered on the music and the visuals. The
experience is textually supported by the emphasis on the size and form of the stereo device - a
visual and metaphorical link to the real-world product-, rotating antenna on both sides, and
respective positioning of the speakers and the dance floor, which signifies a direction for the
experience to flow. The co-designers want to attract the attention of avatars, to whom the actual
rhetorical content (political message) is directed, to the meeting place that is provided by the dance
floor. Therefore, unlike PAL, the primary experiential function of this space is not dissemination of
multimodal content. The design has a dominant discursive political agenda to communicate with
its visitors/users. Multimodality is used as a design resource by which the co-designers semiotize
available communication channels for properly communicating their messages, while offering
users with the affordances for getting engaged in the design.
Interpersonal meaning potentials and the transformative agency of visitors
In some situations, the co-designers’ intentions with particular representations do not match with
the actual use-contexts in which the meaning potentials are actualized by the visitors. In other
words, I am interested in specific design cases, in which user feedback challenges the co- designers’
semiotic associations with their objects, and possibly leads them to modify their design decisions.
Metrotopia and PAL cases show important differences in terms of the visitor feedback aspect,
mainly because of the relatively longer time schedules of these two projects. However, the limited
time period of the workshop projects did not allow other visitors to try out and comment on the
designs. Therefore, this section will exemplify the arguments by drawing on the first two cases.
For instance, Caitlyn reviews the research participants’ efficacy of engagement with Metrotopia,
and she concludes that the locations which succeeded in getting more traffic were the interaction
places with specific experiential potentials. It is possible to relate Caitlyn’s comment below to the
construction of interpersonal meta-functions in order to capture the attention of visitors.
Caitlyn: The costume bazaar worked really well, because they came up with a lot of interesting
costumes. And the Dojo worked well, lot of people had some interesting interactions with
Sensei Serenity. The rest of the island didn’t work terribly well, because it wasn’t interactive
enough, it wasn’t alive enough. There wasn’t enough to do. So people would go away, and just
go often do explore other parts of SL.
Caitlyn’s observations led her to think that interactivity is an essential feature in design of places, in
order to get people engaged. However, Metrotopia’s design was not changed until observation stage
of Caitlyn’s experiment was over, mainly because of a practical methodological limitation: all
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