The whole aspect, the whole approach to producing a multimedia title differs depending on its genre. The differences also reflect the part of the industry that the titles come from. It is significant to note that the industry itself is made up of a lot of disparate sections. People have come from the games area, film and entertainment, public relations, corporate advertising, marketing, the education and training sector, and book publishing sectors. Then, of course, there are the related areas of the industry including the technical sectors, programming, sound, film, design and graphics.

So, the industry is very diverse. It is made up of many component parts. It is still relatively new and hasn't really got an identity, which is good for us. It means that there are no huge traditional barriers arising from it being a coalesced lump of an industry. It is all these little bits and all the bits have got different traditions. Even though men dominate nearly every component of the industry, there isn't a whole male tradition in it, in the way we see it anyway, and that view of it has allowed us to get established.

The result is that there is no built model, there is no tradition and it means that there is no real model for producing a multimedia program. That has given us the opportunity to develop our own model. What is really important for women getting into the industry, is that we don't have to follow somebody else's model, there isn't a tradition, we can do it ourselves, we can do it our own way and we can develop the paradigms for ourselves. And we have certainly benefited because we don't come from any of the traditional areas of programming or systems development. We haven't been constrained by any of those things, we knew what we wanted to achieve and so we thought, "Well, how will we do this" and "We will do this our own way". So who's to argue?

So we have developed our own paradigm. We don't do it the same way that other people that we know of produce multimedia titles. It is a really good opportunity for women to get involved in this industry and to build our own paradigms for making multimedia titles. It is an incredibly powerful medium and we think that it's important for women to be part of it. We have developed our own methods that are non-hierarchical, unstructured and non-linear. It gives us a very high level of flexibility so that we can remain focussed on the end-user throughout the project.

Development by evolution

The first stage in the process of developing a multimedia title is to develop an idea, concept, content, structural design and so on.
Figure A represents the traditional way of approaching one of these projects. It's linear. You start at the beginning. You work your way through. You sign off each stage before you get to the next bit and then some time later you come out at the end. Beyond that there is also the marketing and selling. However, when we do it, this is what it looks like.

Figure B shows our approach. This is the way that we do it and we don't think anyone else does. It is going to be very hard to describe because it is not a linear process. However, as you can see everything happens more or less at the same time, we do start out with an idea and we do end up finishing the trials at the end of it but in between we see the production of a multimedia program as a totally organic event. Everything is interwoven, nothing really is complete until the last day before you cut your final mistress copy of the program. And all the way through the program evolves and develops as we are working through it.

As writing is linear, we will have to deconstruct our process to cover each part but remember that, in our model, there are active connections and overlaps between the parts all the way through the development period.