One can observe that a wide range of human activities involves various forms of de sign. Especially if the goal implies the creation of an artifact, design is at the very center of these activities. It is the general understanding in the public to place design especially in the context of, for example, fashion, furniture, household items, cars, and architecture or in a more general way at the intersection of art and engineering. Of course, in the field of information technology, developers of software and hard ware are called system 'designers'. Design can be identified and considered in the context of many activities related to pUblishing: creating a product ad in a magazine, designing the layout of a newspaper, authoring a book. Summarizing these exam ples as 'creating documents', these are activities where two challenges with respect to design have to be met. Designing the content, its structure, and its relationship to the existing knowledge of potential readers is one, while the other refers to the 'rhetorical' aspects including designing the presentation of the material in order to communicate the content. Publishing is communicating knowledge.

One can observe that a wide range of human activities involves various forms of de sign. Especially if the goal implies the creation of an artifact, design is at the very center of these activities. It is the general understanding in the public to place design especially in the context of, for example, fashion, furniture, household items, cars, and architecture or in a more general way at the intersection of art and engineering. Of course, in the field of information technology, developers of software and hard ware are called system 'designers'. Design can be identified and considered in the context of many activities related to pUblishing: creating a product ad in a magazine, designing the layout of a newspaper, authoring a book. Summarizing these exam ples as 'creating documents', these are activities where two challenges with respect to design have to be met. Designing the content, its structure, and its relationship to the existing knowledge of potential readers is one, while the other refers to the 'rhetorical' aspects including designing the presentation of the material in order to communicate the content. Publishing is communicating knowledge.

This most unusual book results from the NATO Advanced Research Work shop, "Designing Hypertext/Hypermedia for Learning", held in Rottenburg am Neckar, FRO, from July 3-8, 1989. The idea for the workshop resulted from the burgeoning interest in hypertext combined with the frustrating lack of literature on leaming applications for hypertext. There was little evidence in 1988 that hypertext could successfully support learning out comes. A few projects were investigating hypertext for learning, but few conclusions were available and little if any advice on how to design hyper text for learning applications was available. Could hypertext support learning objectives? What mental processing requirements are unique to learning outcomes? How would the processing requirements of learning outcomes interact with unique user processing requirements of browsing and constructing hypertext? Should hypertext information bases be restruc tured to accommodate learning outcomes? Should the user interface be manipulated in order to support the task functionality of learning outcomes? Does the hypertext structure reflect the intellectual requirements of learning outcomes? What kinds of learning-oriented hypertext systems were being developed and what kinds of assumptions were these systems making? These and other questions demonstrated the need for this workshop. The workshop included presentations, hardware demonstrations, sharing and browsing of hypertexts, and much discussion about all of the above. These were the experiences that you, the reader of this book, unfortunately did not experience.

This is the latest volume in the 'Workshops in Computing' series, and contains papers from the International Workshop on Hpyermedia Design, held in Montpellier, France, from 1 - 2 June 1995. The workshop aimed to provide a forum for researchers and practitioners from a variety of backgrounds to discuss the many facets of hypermedia design. Among the specific topics covered by the papers are: design methods, multimedia modelling, higher structures in hypermedia design spaces, user-interface design for hypermedia, building distributed web applications, and hyperdialogs. The resulting volume provides a comprehensive overview of the state of the art in this important field. It will be of interest to researchers, practitioners and students involved in any aspect of hypermedia design.

The hypermedia authoring process has been vividly described in a special issue of the Economist as a combination of writing a book, a play, a film, and a radio or television show: A hypermedia document combines all these elements and adds some of its own. The author' s first job is to structure and explain all of the infor mation. The author then must distill the information into brief, descriptive nodes. Each node has to contain a Iist of the ingredients, and instructions on how the ingredients are mixed together to the greatest advantage. The structure of the material provided is translated into an architectural metaphor of some kind; much of the designer' s work is the creation of this imaginary space. Then, the designers must chart the details of what to animate, what to film, who to inter view, and how to arrange the information in the space tobe built [Eco95a]. This book presents guidelines, tools, and techniques for prospective authors such that they can design better hypermedia documents and applications. lt surveys the different techniques used to organize, search, and structure infor mation in a large information system. It then describes the algorithms used to locate, reorganize, and link data to enable navigation and retrieval. It Iooks in detail at the creation and presentation of certain types of visual information, namely algorithm animations. It introduces new mechanisms for editing audio and video data streams.

This book aims at exploring and illustrating the different ways in which hypermedia systems and tools are designed according to those aspects. The design and visualization schemes included in any system will be related to the variety of social and technical complexities confronted by researchers in social, communication, humanities, art and design.