page 3 As the banking analogy signalled at the start of this book, the central role of the Living Garden is to ask questions about the way values are becoming defined - rather than reflected by - digital technology. "How is the value of a (multimedia) `asset' defined?"; "what is an authoring tool?" and "who is an author?" for example. Anyone using Macromedia Director is already working within someone else's definition of what an authoring tool is, and therefore what the authoring process is about. It is almost as though the definition of a writer was one that was based on ownership of a word-processing programme - "he'll never win the Booker, doesn't know how to use his spell checker...".

The personal, social, rationale of the Garden scheme is also intended to challenge the prevailing assumption that defines multimedia as a `product-based' activity - one which is largely defined at present within a commercial consumer-based publishing framework. Again, why is this accepted at present?

The concentration on the social context of messages received within a Garden was to a great extent a reaction to the type of associations promised by commercial hypertext systems - characterised by products like Microsoft's Encarta. Single entities which whilst claiming to be encyclopaedic, linking all things for all men - are in reality tiny, closed, localised world-views; `places' you randomly wander through, moving along a path where you find yourself suddenly traversing from Aardvark to Zulu for no apparent reason. The reason that this type of journey is ultimately meaningless is that the underlying purpose of Encarta and similar multimedia products is not about knowledge or education - the hidden reality and reason for their shape and form is because these are instruments fashioned with the purpose of exploiting digital technology to amplify cash. If the point of journeying through the Garden seems vague, is this so very different from what we actually get (rather than what we are promised) by commercial multimedia products today?

Multimedia at present is beset with the cut-and-paste mentalities which aim to create definition-by-association. At present, it is as though by using or referencing `great' works of literature, philosophy, design or mathematics, ownership or understanding of those ideas is conferred on the user, or somehow implicitly added to the value of a multimedia product.

The vague recipes behind so much multimedia work - a bit of text here, some library video there, the ready-mixed contents of a record company's press pack promoting a new band, that Adobe Photoshop 3.0 layers-look, some LSD there for the sake of creativity, all fronted by an interface as an afterthought serving little more than purpose than a nice `pack shot' - ensure that the Gestalt whole is often very much less than the sum of the parts. With digital technology allowing the cook to mix virtually anything without some kind of forethought, it is perhaps hardly surprising that the feast we have been promised is turning out to be indigestible and generally unsatisfying.

As mentioned at the start of the chapter, the intellectual space in front of the final `wall' of the Living Garden has deliberately been left open. The intention is to provide a space where concepts about technology, social needs and man-machine interface, derived from the other three corners of the Garden (along with the occasional idea which might float in from outside the Garden's walls) might combine to seed something completely new. This is an idea in its first season, and its shape and limits have yet to be defined, but what fun it would be to cultivate further...