Multimodal Semiotics and Collaborative Design

Affordances as meaning and action potentials, where I build my arguments on the semiotic
and experiential characteristics of affordances, and provide empirical examples to argue the
context-specific and dialogic nature of affordances.
Implications for platform and content developers, which includes discussions on particular
issues that forthcoming user-driven VW platforms could benefit from, mainly in terms of
considering affordance as a meaning resource and a design tool.
Implications for designers, which mainly includes the possible ways in which professional
or amateur designers could think in terms of virtual places and artifacts to collaborate and
co-design in a virtual studio environment.
Analyzing virtual worlds as places
When SL is conceptualized as a network of virtual places (Bartle 2004), it becomes possible to
discuss not only the visual or structural characteristics, but also the experiential and semiotic
potentials (i.e. Tuan 1977) that are actualized by practices of making and using these places. In
other words, virtual places are not designed to be looked at, or simply be watched, but they intend
to capture the attention of their users by providing an experiential space, and a social place, to be
navigated by their visitors. This is the main reason for my application and critical appropriation of
the architectural model for systemic functional analysis (O’Toole 1994, 2004), as I consider virtual
places and artifacts semiotically more pertinent to the built environments than they are to words,
images, paintings or music. Therefore, the analysis of SL’s places with a multimodal framework
provides important insights on the relations between modes, meaning potentials and functionality
when the design of VWs is considered an architectural problem (Bridges and Charitos 1997).
The analysis also shows that, during the collaborative design processes, the co-designers often
make use of the spatial modes of avatar interaction, as they use the verbal modes of text or voice
chat in combination with the non-verbal modes of avatar-mediated communication. In this respect
the conclusions of my analysis draw similarities to both Ondrejka’s (2005) comparison of three
dimensional virtual places with the graphical Web interfaces, and Schroeder’s (2011) theses on the
role of verbal and non-verbal modes in collaborative action in CVEs. The virtual place also provides
a distributed design studio environment (Maher and Simoff 2000, Reffat et al 2008), where the
aim of the design activity is to transform space into ‘inhabited place’ (Weiley and Pisan 2008). The
analysis also supports the role of design representations in distributed collaboration (Gu el al,
2011), and the importance of ‘objects to think with’ distributed design environments (Larsson
2003).
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