Multimodal Semiotics and Collaborative Design

creative activities and reduce the potentials for interdisciplinary collaboration offered by social
affordances of a VW platform such as SL.
Finally, while embedding potential affordances and constraints, the platform developers should
consider how some VW designers can (and often are willing to) resist, challenge and test the
platform to its limits. Modes and meaning resources in the tools of design can also differ from
context to context, and are partly shaped by the VW’s inherent capabilities. The experiential,
interpersonal and textual meta-functions apply not only for the designed places and artifacts but
also for the tools, resources and platforms in which the co-designers generate the social functions
of the virtual places and artifacts as semiotic resources.
Implications for Designers
Co-production of virtual places and artifacts in SL illustrates innovative potentials of digital
technologies for the participatory design of multimodal interactive experiences. As I have argued,
the virtual places in SL present tools and affordances as a collaborative tool for real-time design
and testing, synchronous and asynchronous collaboration, and places to generate, build and
evaluate the designs together.
The spatial characteristics of virtual places and avatar interaction also present affordances for
professional design projects, which could be affective in collaborative processes of not only
architects, but also product or game designers. The analysis shows that the prim system provides
the designers with a simple but comprehensive modular toolkit to produce complex geometries
from simple geometric units. The standard object generation method and the object-texture-script
model 2 in prims provide a wide solution space for creative experimentation and problem-solving. I
consider this method of using simple modular units for multimodal expression also a helpful
approach for design education, where students are often motivated to work in groups to generate
ideas, build mock-ups and models and test out their designs through renders, simulations or
sketches. It is also possible to develop potential solution spaces for designing in SL by
incorporating other tools and resources, such as external design software and online resources. As
the socio-technical environment develops by co-production of content and tools, so does the codesigners’
search for more complex methods and tools. On the other hand, inclusiveness in tools
and resources brings a considerable amount of complexity, thus presents a significant learning
requirement for the beginners. The experience of social affordances differs when a person uses
either a VW to design in a shared virtual space or a professional 3D modeling tool. On the other
hand, the potentials and pitfalls of the VW technology for the context of professional design
2
The method of producing virtual artifacts by applying textures and scripts on primitive geometric units (prims).
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