Ates Gursimsek

I am a designer and new media researcher focusing on collaborative design and user-driven innovation in connected virtual places, or 'Virtual Worlds' (VW), and how certain affordances and limitations of existing VW platforms facilitate avatars' experiences of participation, collaboration and co-creation. My PhD research involves Second Life, as the major community-authored VW platform, as well as other social VWs (Minecraft, IMVU, WoW ...) and Web3D applications, and I am working closely with Metaverse builders, platform developers and other creative communities. My purpose in doing what I am doing is to understand how people collectively co-create worlds of signification, and make sense of the virtual environment as a collaborative design of their collective intelligence. In that respect, I may also define myself as a "social semiotician who is interested in learning how worlds came to be the way they happen