Multimodal Semiotics and Collaborative Design

Socio-cultural perspectives on co-design in virtual worlds
Drawing on the synthesis of the VW research literature thus far, I consider the user-driven codesign
practices in SL examples of social creativity. Design researchers Gerhard Fischer and Elisa
Giaccardi describe social creativity as:
[T]he diverse and collective stock of scientific content and artistic or stylistic ideas that
individuals and communities share, re-interpret, and use as a basis for new ideas and visions
constitutes the vital source of invention and creativity (Fischer and Giaccardi 2007: 28).
In such creative social practices, individual and social creativity can (and should) complement each
other, as creative output often results from interaction with tools and artifacts and from
collaborating with other individuals (Fischer et al. 2005). The collaborative platforms are
challenged in their attempts to provide socio-technical environments that would activate user
communities and bring social creativity alive, not only because of individual and social differences,
but also because of a variety of ‘distances’, which involve multiple dimensions. In Fischer and
Giaccardi’s metadesign approach to social creativity, these distances are conceptualized “(1)
spatially (across physical distance), (2) temporally (across time), (3) technologically (across
artifacts), and (4) conceptually (across individuals, communities, and cultures)” (Fischer and
Giaccardi 2007: 28). In their view, collaborative platforms such as SL harness the potential synergy
of many creative users by offering tools, resources, environments and communities of metadesign,
and providing affordances for exploration of emerging opportunities. For Elisa Giaccardi (2005),
metadesign represents a constructive mode of design, rather than simply a new model of design, in
that it promotes “collaborative and transformational practices of design that can support new
modes of human interaction and sustain an expansion of the creative process” (Giaccardi 2005:
15). To capture the complexity of social creativity –particularly in digital technologies-, the focus in
metadesign is kept on design of general systems and processes rather than isolated content
(objects), and the relational structures that allow the design environments to evolve through social
interaction.
The emphasis on socio-cultural characteristics and social histories of collaboratively produced
design cultures in VWs is apparent in game designer and researcher Celia Pearce’s (2006) study on
‘productive play’, where Pearce traces the virtual artifacts designed by the Uru gamer community
in VWs including SL and There. Pearce argues that boundaries between play and production, work
and leisure, and between media consumption and media production are increasingly blurring in
places such as SL. She describes VWs as dynamic, two-way mediums where the audience has as
much power to create as the producer; and suggests user-generated content as a new business
model, with new business opportunities. Although Pearce is interested in affordances for general
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