Multimodal Semiotics and Collaborative Design

suggests that it is important for the co-design processes to consider how the platform affords
participation, communication and collaboration among various social actors with different social
backgrounds and interests (i.e. geographical location, time-zone, RL occupations), how it provides
places and tools for both synchronous and asynchronous design interaction, and how it utilizes the
users’ creative problem-solving skills in order to create communities of ‘makers’.
An important factor in creation of co-production experience in SL is the movements of avatars and
content between connected virtual places. It is important for such platforms to afford collaborative
design practices to unfold in various time-scales (hetechrony) among various (virtual and physical)
places. For instance, the analyses showed that the co-designers often prefer to work alone, although
they are aware of the affordances for real-time collaboration in a shared virtual space by using their
avatars to walk and fly around the object of design. Although avatars and virtual objects afford this
certain type of interaction, it is not only the real-time ‘design by walking around’ method and
digital co-presence in shared virtual space that presents SL as a complex nexus of creative
practices. It is beneficial to the VW designers when the platform offers places and affordances for
users to be involved in progression of design, at the same time allowing the co-designers to have
their collaborative and private spaces to think, experiment, try and fail. Thus, it is important to
consider how a VW platform provides places, tools and resources for not only collaborative (realtime)
content generation, but also asynchronous presentation, evaluation, testing and modification
of designs.
Another important issue is how the platform provides tools that would balance ‘complexity of use’
and ‘freedom to create’ for a wide range of creative users. As demonstrated by the workshop
students it is beneficial to the VW designers when the platform provides them with adequate
resources (i.e. libraries, tutorials, search tools, community platforms, external Web resources) and
support the development of innovative new design solutions. The semiotic association of ‘prims’
with LEGO modular toy series is a good analogy to illustrate how primitive structural elements can
provide designers with larger solution spaces. The affordances of prim system for the construction
of complex shapes by geometric combinations of simple objects provide a shared resource to think
with; at the same time, the combinations of prims, textures and animations present meaningmaking
as an alternative design tool. However, as the analysis demonstrates, the interpretations of
the co-designers of the prim system may be subjective, and a perceived affordance for a
professional user may be interpreted as a limitation by a novice designer, or vice versa. As an
alternative approach, limiting the potential affordances and constraints to emphasize a particular
user group, such as professional architects/designers or amateur builders could help build interestspecific
content groups. On the other hand, such an approach may reduce the possible range of
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