Integrating design and development in the production of multimedia documents

Production of multimedia artifacts demands guidance for both engineers developing software and designers generating content. This paper distinguishes conceptually between media, multiple media and multimedia and defines the multimedia document as both communicative object and system, thus identifying integration as a fundamental of production. It proposes media transformations as a means of describing the design activities involved in the generation of media elements containing content. It defines navigable discourse structure as the discourse structure actually realised by the combination of media elements and operations, and it proposes a discourse driven process model. From a practical point of view, the paper outlines two case studies of the production of multimedia demonstrations of software engineering tools. It provides transformation representation rules as a succinct means for recording media transformations. Finally it describes the main components of a practical method, based on the process model, for the production of multimedia documents.