Multimedia design can be reduced to the process of choosing a presentation fonn which can be mapped to a set of domain concepts which you wish to communicate to users so that they can use the concepts to perfonn a task as effectively and efficiently as possible. Since the design task is for multimedia, the set of possible presentation fonns is as wide as possible, while their are constraints placed on the possible fonns, and the mapping, due to cost, time, bandwidth of communication,

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... n station abilities etc. derived from the overall task. One of the major choices in multimedia design is to choose how much of the design process takes place off-line by a skilled human designer, and how much is perfonned automatically by the system. the consequences of this choice for the role of the designer and the concomitant interactions with the constraints on multimedia design are explored in this paper with reference three systems developed in the last ten years: SMIL/GRiNS (Bultennan et aI, 1998) , MIPS (Jeffery et aI, 1994; Macnee et aI, 1995) and MMI2 (Binot et al ,1990; Wilson & Conway, 1991) . The Synchronised Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL pronounced smile) has recently been proposed by W3C for synchronising multimedia presentations over the world wide web, and GRiNS is the first editor to support authoring in it. SMIL supports four constructs: layout, timing, hyperlinking and tailorability of the presentation, while the human designer chooses the content of a presentation. A. Sutcliffe et al. (eds.), Designing Effective and Usable Multimedia Systems