Introduction page 2

The Living Garden's roots rest within a project which formed part of the Master of Arts programme in interactive multimedia which I attended at the Royal College of Art in 1995.

As this course progressed, I, along with several colleagues who collaborated on the Living Garden project, rapidly became disillusioned with the way that `multimedia' - as the "integration of images, sound and text into new forms through computer technology" - was being pedalled. This definition, it seemed to us, derived more from the interests of computer hardware manufactures keen to sell us multimedia hardware than from individuals who saw real applications, or genuine needs and uses for these systems.

As this course progressed, I along with several colleagues who collaborated on the Living Garden project, rapidly became disillusioned with the way that `multimedia' - as the "integration of images, sound and text into new forms through computer technology" - was being pedalled. This definition, it seemed to us, derived more from the interests of computer hardware manufactures keen to sell us multimedia hardware than from individuals who saw real applications, or genuine needs and uses for these systems. The technology-led, computer cognoscente belief that `multime dia' and related systems like the Internet (the world-wide network of computers) will apparently `empower' us in various, mysterious, ways currently seems to be accepted as an article of faith in many circles, but in reality there seems little to justify these claims at the moment.

The idea of the Living Garden was seeded to grow something new from this arid ground and is an attempt to cultivate a new way of looking at some of the possible roles of digital technology in our lives. The essence of the Living Garden is simply to provide a mechanism for people to establish a form of contact between each other. The Garden is something of a hybrid: as a communications medium it sits somewhere between the telephone and the computer - it aims to emulate the simplicity and ease of use of the telephone handset, but at the same time make use of the potential power offered by digital technology to transparently tailor environments and events for an individual. It differs from both these systems in that the value of the Garden is not to be judged by what appear to have become the reference points for defining the `success' of multimedia - profit-margins, market-share, the Kudos of the Great-and-the-Good, or approval by external authorities. The value of the Garden is based upon the values of those who care to use it, because - within certain constraints - the Garden provides the means for each and everyone of us to develop an individual landscape of thoughts, voices and memories, what Simon Schama calls a `Manscape'.