Multimodal Semiotics and Collaborative Design

place is” (Bartle 2008: 2). With a socio-cultural perspective on place-making to VWs, a “structured
crowd in a designed space” suggests the presence of a “world-maker” (Damer 2009: 13); thus, it is
possible to relate the design activity to co-creation of social places and the feeling of co-presence in
VWs. Therefore, the place-centric perspective also makes an ethnographic approach more
conceivable, as place-making denotes socio-cultural field-sites (Boellstorff 2008).
SL’s affordances for 3D visual representation and mediated spatial interaction are also related to
the social construction of feelings of presence and co-presence in virtual places. For ex-Linden Lab
developer Cory Ondrejka (2005), online interaction differs from inworld interaction in SL because
it is mostly asynchronous, lacks the spatial cognition and the virtual space it represents is
descriptive rather than experiental (Ondrejka 2005). In this respect, virtual places are “computermediated
dynamic world models that create a sense of place” (Maher and Simoff 2000: 1). This
idea of creating a sense of place foregrounds the phenomenological and metaphorical aspects of
virtual place-making, as it emphasizes the mediated spatial experiences. Communication professor
Sisse Siggaard Jensen (2009, 2011, 2012) explores avatar-mediated social activities of coproduction
and user-driven innovation in various VW platforms, including game-worlds and SL,
and concludes: “[t]he driving dynamics of visions and emotional engagement, cognitive efforts and
learning as enacted do not only lead to adaptation to the worlds but also to transformative
dialogues” (Jensen 2012: 402). Jensen (2012) emphasizes a metaphorical understanding of virtual
world-making through an interpretive semiotic framework of avatars as personal mediators.
Architectural design in virtual worlds
In fact, Bartle’s (2004, 2008) place metaphor has influenced a range of ideas and concepts that
associated VWs with the physical built environment since the early conceptual formation of the
research field (Gu et al. 2011). Following Bartle, when virtual worlds are defined as places, which
accommodate human activities such as navigation, interaction and communication, it is
reasonable to consider design of a virtual place as an architectural problem as well (Bridges and
Charitos 1997). Architectural design scholars Alan Bridges and Dimitrios Charitos (1997) have
observed virtual environments (VEs) through virtual reality technologies to ask how architectural
design knowledge can contribute to the design of virtual environments. Bridges and Charitos refer
to taxonomies of existential and urban spaces, and they categorize the elements that a VE includes
as: places where particular activities are carried out; paths, which express a tendency towards
mobility and expansion; places that relate to several directions; system of paths that divide
environment into domains; thresholds, locus of interaction between any spatial elements, meeting
points between two paths and openings; and space establishing elements which define the objects
that constitute the VE. Although their work is rather dated with respect to the development pace of
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