Design in Virtuality
11/17/04
Aimee Weber is a fashion designer. Her styles are straight off the streets of New York, like the Madonna outfits of the mid 80's. Talking in a recent interview about her design process:
"Well, it normally starts with me seeing stuff I like in the streets. I also keep a digital camera in my purse, in case I see something cool, like a building front, or a dumpster, or cloth pattern I like. And I just collect all these textures. I have them all over my computer. Then when I see a fashion I like, maybe a chickie with a cool skirt on the subway, something urban chic, I go home, I try to find textures that come close."
But, in order to get your hands on her designs, you've got to get virtual. Her clothing and accessories is only available in-game, through her boutique in Second Life, a massively multiplayer online game. And she's not alone. Second Life has a growing number of users who focus on designing elaborate homes, cars, furniture, and even SciFi-type vehicles.
Some of the projects are so elaborate that they almost become "second jobs". Baccara Rhodes, a real life events coordinator recently planned the online wedding of two in-game friends. The elaborate affair took place on a boat, and needed weeks of preparation and hundreds of dollars of real life money. An even bigger production was staged for a birthday by transforming Cayman Island into L Frank Baum's Wizard of Oz. Even the witch with the skywriting was there!
Of course, it's not all fun and games. The Jessie war was a ridiculously bloody conflict which flared for a while in one of the player-killer sections of the simulator. Complete with player built walls and guns, the conflict has finally burned itself out, but who knows what violence is still simmering. Another interesting, but disturbing use of in-game creation is "The White Room", a photoshoot staged inside the Max Paine game engine. The artist created scenes which suggested previous violence that prompted viewers to fit histories to the scenes.
Currently, all this is triviality -- it's fun, but it's not really design, is it? Well, in the coming years, as more of our time is spent online, and presumably, using virtual representations of ourselves and others, won't our physical design skills come into play just the same as they do now? As computing becomes more and more a physical analogue, and less and less a 2-D abstraction, physical design, ergonomics, and user understanding will become just as important as they are now in their real-world counterparts. Until then, if you're interested, Second Life probably needs cool looking product. What are you waiting for!
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Tech Thursday: Fake It To Make It
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