Two large corporations a computer company hoping to develop technical expertise in new areas, and a publisher seeking new markets formed a partnership to develop a multimedia system for university engineering education. The project team was diverse. Most of its members came from the computer company, but they consisted of scientists, programmers, and engineers from many specialty areas, including information retrieval, multimedia systems, human-computer interaction, and artificial intelligence. The team also included one representative from the publishing company and two university professors who served as education consultants.

The envisioned system would make it easy for professors to create multimedia case studies for class activities in which students worked with case study content individually and in groups in an open-ended manner, analyzing them and preparing multimedia reports. All communication regarding the assignments (distribution, questions, submission, and evaluation) would take place over a network. The system must be accessible to both teachers and students, although the concrete activities of the two user groups would be quite distinct. A set of instructional modules would be built to demonstrate and test the capabilities of the system. The project required digitization of substantial content video, text, sound, and images in support of the example course modules.

The first few months culminated in an all-hands meeting, during which a prototype was to be demonstrated. In fact, two prototypes were demonstrated at this meeting, with rather different objectives. The core team built a rapid prototype in Smalltalk, showing a very basic user interface but including a skeleton for underlying system services. The consultants...