Where is this place?

Place is arguably an essential component of most successful virtual environments, yet the concept of what is “place”, and what sort of “placeness” is required for digital environments, are seldom discussed. A reflexive argument such as here is a place because it was designed to be a place does not stimulate design guidelines for virtual places, and it certainly does not help us create and evaluate virtual places suitable for audiences who vary in intention or in available technology. To articulate useful distinctions between virtual places, this paper extends design guidelines proposed by Kalay and Marx, reshapes them with the help of Relphis definitions, into spatial visualisation and activity-based environments, and adds a further category, the hermeneutic. The paper also proposes a graduated matrix for selection of place making elements and for selecting a mode of representation appropriate to the design objective of the virtual environment, be it spatial, activity-based, or hermeneutic