Short summary of the book - The Living Garden

"How is the value of a (multimedia) 'asset' defined?"; "what is an authoring tool?"; "who is an author?" These are some of the issues which rest at the heart of the Living Garden, an attempt to raise questions about the prevailing definition multimedia as a 'product-based' phenomenon: an activity which, at present, is largely defined at within a commercial consumer-based publishing framework.

To these ends, the Garden proposes a scheme with a social (rather than market-led) purpose. The Garden identifies how a range of computer-based technologies, tools, interfaces and social behaviours could combine to establish a cultural 'memory bank' to provide the means through which individuals may communicate in a variety of ways. The technical process behind the system - active technology & environments and client-server multimedia databases - is summarised in the following five figures. The social interactions within the environment are, however, best described within the body of the long text describing this world of the Garden.

In highlighting a different way of using multimedia technology, the aim is to open a debate about current and future directions in the area, for what - disturbingly for such a new field - is already becoming a conservative area in which to work.

In essence the Living Garden is a kind of banking system, but one which instead of trading in Pounds, Dollars or Yen deals in the currency of human memories. The Living Garden is, literally, a memory bank.

The high street branches of this memory bank are not constructed from bricks and mortar but from grass, trees, stone, water, sun and light. In other words elements from the physical world deliberately arranged into a certain shape to create a special place - a garden. The garden provides the means and the place to obtain access to these messages and memories. The garden part of the Living Garden is, therefore, very much a real location. It is not a metaphor, or a description of an image of a garden on a computer screen, but as real as Kenwood, Kew, Fontainebleau or Yosemite National Park.

Beyond the garden walls, the architecture of this scheme provides mechanisms and means which allow anyone to record 'meme' like' messages which will be replayed within the garden. Thoughts and feelings - in words, sounds and images can all be recorded and unlocked at a later time, simply by visiting a garden.

The Living Garden is therefore an architectural scheme with communal gardens as its 'buildings'. These gardens create a space which - whilst being able to serve a vast population of human memories - can provide a unique, intensely personal experience for any single individual.

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 boxes than from individuals who saw real applications, or genuine needs and uses for these systems.

The technology-led, computer cognoscente belief that 'multimedia' 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, the aesthetic criteria of Photoshop 3.0 layers, 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'

In the same way that technological innovation like the telephone has not replaced other forms of dialogue, the Living Garden is not intended to be a substitute for other social and technological modes of communication. Rather, the aim is to provide an additional channel which can add to the ways in which people can talk to each other. The Living Garden does this simply by providing a means by which anyone may record personal messages (in a variety of forms) which are ultimately delivered within any one of a number of landscape settings.

It is important to be clear that the garden part of the Living Garden is very much a real garden - convincing people of this fact is always the most difficult task when they first hear of the idea. The reasons for using an natural, open landscape will, I hope, become apparent as one moves through the pages of this Web site.

The Living Garden is, then, a vehicle which aims to take us away from what currently seem like narrow and inadequate definitions and uses of technology for technology's sake. The desire to drive off at high speed, willy-nilly, in panic and frustration from this starting point marked by 2-D computer screens, autoexec.bat files and noisy, expensive computer hardware - to go almost anywhere else - is understandable enough. I hope, however, that the visitor to this site will see how the Living Garden serves not just as sketch map which may help us escape from where we are, but which can also provide a compass to point us in the direction of a less cluttered and confused environment. Something which takes us towards fresh horizons which throw light not just on new ways of using developing technology, but which - most importantly - should start to make us ask questions about whose needs and what priorities are shaping the multimedia landscape of today.