Multimodal Semiotics and Collaborative Design

teams –including differences in working habits and task organizations, mediation of co-creation
practices involving many creative personalities– as he describes the co-production of Nexus Prime
“emergence within emergence” (Au 2008: 47). The challenging issue is to create the social bonds
that keep the avatars together and to determine common design principles in order to keep a
relative level of persistence within the co-designed places. A similar approach to Nexus Prime was
also tried by Jensen’s (2008) study, in which Jensen and her colleagues attempted to launch a
virtual library in SL with an open co-design vision, which encouraged avatars to join in and
configure the place. However, the vision of the project was not realized as it resulted in poor
designer interaction, and limitations of creative privileges (Jensen 2008). Such examples show that
it is not only the technical and structural aspects of the world’s interfaces’ design that affects the
development of co-design practices, but also the social and cultural norms about communicating,
collaborating and co-creating in virtual places with avatars.
2.3. Conclusion: Framing the co-design of virtual places as social semiotic practice
By the place-centric framing of VWs, I intend to emphasize not only the visual qualities and the
dimensions of three-dimensional space, but also the spatial practices and place-making
experiences of the user-designers of SL. For this purpose, I have analyzed VW research literature
and drew concepts to guide the analytical framework in this chapter. Evidently, the most central of
the analytical concepts I use is virtual place. Here, I am interested in how the visual metaphors of
place-making are constructed through transformative dialogues between designers and users of the
VW, and how the semiotic, as well as structural, associations to the places of the physical world are
built. VW designers combine visual metaphors and functional aspects in ways that can be
compared to conventional practices of architectural design, whereas there are also considerable
differences between the two domains. The technical and aesthetic knowledge transferred from realworld
designs can still be applied in different contexts. Often times, the design of virtual places and
artifacts resemble the ways in which architectural spaces are organized in the physical world, and a
sense-of-place is represented within them. On the other hand, the hyper-real physics of the VW
and its specific affordances provide the designers with freedom and flexibility to experiment with
designing experiences that may not be possible in the physical world. The effects of knowledge
transfer between the two domains are not limited by the visual characteristics of designed forms,
but they also include the ways in which designers organize their social practices by using the VWs
affordances. These two points are important for my analysis: both the semiotic characteristics of
virtual places and artifacts, and the ways in which they are co-created as meaningful signs point to
multimodal discursive relationships to their so-called real-world counterparts.
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