Process Report Concerning the Design and Construction of Woolf World: a Virtual Bloomsbury

This is my process report regarding my participation in designing and constructing a Second Life replica of the Omega Workshop and Monk's House. Some portions of this paper were abridged due to their sensitive nature. I'm publishing the paper here in case my insights into virtual environment design and team management may be of assistance to other designers and fledgling project leaders.

Sean J. Callot
Dr. Holmevik
RCID 813: Special Topics: Videogames
9 December 2008

Process Report Concerning the Design and Construction of Woolf World: a Virtual Bloomsbury
A significant part of the RCID Videogames course required teams of graduate students to design and build constructions in Second Life. Both of the main teams were assigned to reproduce idealized versions of real world buildings using the virtual construction palette available in the Second Life design suite. For some groups, this posed unusual challenges not present using other assisted drafting programs. As project leader, my team overcame these challenges and successfully designed and constructed an effective representation of the Omega Workshop and Virginia Woolf’s home, Monk’s House.

I have been aware and tangentially associated with the planning of this construction since long before I began the RCID Special Topics: Videogames class. Drs. Jan Holmevik and Elisa Sparks discussed the tools and techniques necessary to build a kind of virtual Bloomsbury, allowing students, teachers, and enthusiasts of modernist English literature a place in the virtual environment of Second Life. The idea was to build a virtual classroom for the focused study of how and where Virginia Woolf and her contemporaries, friends, and colleagues lived and worked. A construction of this nature would give visitors a solid feel for the environment and help to focus their discourse. If an avatar sits in a chair in a construction of the same room Virginia Woolf sat and contemplated the affairs of her time, the human controlling the avatar may be more easily absorbed in the discourse of Woolf’s world and work. Additionally, as I learned from numerous discussions with Dr. Sparks, the project’s sponsoring client, Woolf enthusiasts tend to be very detail-oriented and obsessed with experiencing as much of Woolf’s life as possible. Giving these enthusiasts an authentic environment in which to enjoy their passion is a great honor, not to mention a great experience in 3D virtual design and construction.

My team of RCID PhD candidates selected me, a lowly MAPC student, to lead and direct the construction of our virtual Bloomsbury representation. I had built a couple of other constructions in Second Life, but nothing on this scale. I took a very phased approach toward planning, designing and building our construction. We decided, after analysis of images and schematics researched and prepared by Dr. Sparks’ modernist London class. Her students provided us with a significant volume of information, which Dr. Sparks herself presented to us with suggestions and recommendations. My team focused not only on what would be the most interesting and challenging to build, but also what would be the most feasible to accomplish in our short time table. Initially, our plan was to build each of the three locations Dr. Sparks suggested, arranging buildings carefully around our development island to produce distinct environmental conditions relevant to each building. However, after realizing our skills in construction and design in SL construction were not as well developed as I had hoped, we decided to scale back our initial design, focusing on the Omega Workshop and the artistic styles those artists embodied. After learning about potential legal concerns with a second location, Monk’s House, Virginia Woolf’s home, we decided to include a significantly modified version of this building in our overall design. Decisions of this kind epitomize my team’s drive and ability to change a limitation into an opportunity. Since we had a three-story block of flats from Fitzroy Square in London, and since we were only using the ground floor, we decided to build a replica of the living room from Monk’s House using the remaining space.

As project leader, my job began with doling out responsibilities to my team members. Beginning with the design document and assigning overall responsibilities for the construction itself, I took each member’s abilities and professional and academic backgrounds into consideration. Some team members are very skilled at summarizing overall design strategies while others are more focused on details. I ensured that no single team member was assigned any more work than they could handle, save for my own workload. My leadership style very much follows the US Army leadership ethos of “Be, Know, Do.” By taking on a sizeable portion of the work for myself, I feel my team members were more likely to swiftly and efficiently complete their own work. After all, how would it look to have a master’s student out perform a PhD student?

In keeping with this leadership style and my personal work ethic, I built as much of the external structure as I supervised. One team member focused on designing the external walls while another focused on entry points and external aesthetics. I lent a hand where I was needed and spent a lot of time figuring out what textures would represent the real world feel of the Omega Workshop block. A couple of team members did most of the heavy lifting in this portion of the project; I served merely as an assistant and “look and feel” designer. When technical problems arose, I acted as troubleshooter. Rather than simply getting into the system itself and hammering the problem out (which I also did), I set policies and guidelines, derived from my personal experience, research from the SL community, and suggestions from Dr. Holmevik. After a couple of hiccups in the construction, our superstructure was built.

Luckily, my colleagues working with furniture design and construction worked virtually autonomously. On more than one occasion, my desires for textures and furniture were addressed before I even know what I needed. One team member's resourcefulness and performance was exceptional, and his ability to develop innovative solutions to problems before they arose was indispensible. Our combined efforts produced a fantastic representation of the Workshop, and even included several pieces of originally designed furniture that embodies the design concepts of the original artists.

The design and construction of Monk’s House, however, fell on half the team’s shoulers, including my own. In the final weeks of the project, when I saw that the Omega Workshop was progressing well, I turned my attention to figuring out how to move a portion of a country home into an urban landscape. A couple of team members, including myself, took turns designing different aspects of the Monk’s House living room, our final distillation of the Monk’s House experience. Two of us put in the most work on designing and building the living room, since the rest had a good handle on what had to be done with finishing Omega. My partner built a teleporter to access the living room, while I, again, focused on the look and feel of the house. As project lead, I fielded revision requests and input from Dr. Sparks, tweaking and polishing every aspect of the living room. I attribute this as simply executing the duties of a project lead for a project of this scale.

I would like to take this opportunity to mention one thing. For as much difficulty as Dr. Sparks gave our team during the design and major construction phases of this project, her input was invaluable. She provided some period-accurate furniture and textures, corrected some of our misconceptions on Omega-style artwork, and helped us gain a sense of context that we then applied to our overall design. She was an active client, and without her our project would not be as complete as we would have liked.

Large-scale projects in a virtual environment are difficult. In much the same way that Unix and Linux servers are designed to restrict unauthorized access to root directories, SL restricts access of objects in the world based on the permissions embedded into the objects’ code. While we did not have the same kinds of problems the Patient Room group had with editing permissions, we did have to adapt to this unfamiliar procedure. We ended up using those permissions to set up a workflow, which helped me maintain accountability of what tasks had been completed, which objects needed editing, and who needed to get on the ball. In future projects, I’ll use this procedure more effectively to design the group workflow and ensure that team members are not scrambling to figure out who’s portions of the project are junked and why.

I learned a lot about project management, time management, and 3D virtual design as my team struggled with this project. The tools and techniques I’ve picked up from this assignment will shape how I conduct business in my career and in future projects. I had a great time working with modernist London, but I’m looking forward to exploring virtual environments for a few weeks before getting back to building them.