Backyard is a cooperatively constructed multimedia project produced by us, the graduate students enrolled in the Summer 1993 session of the course, "The Multimedia Classroom" at the University of British Columbia. Each of us became a manager of a team within the production crew and was responsible for our own video, text, and sound backyard portrait. The navigator and executive director for this project was Dr. Ricki Goldman-Segall, Director of the Multimedia Ethnographic Research Lab (MERLin).

Screen Shot from Project Backyard Constellations Database

Backyard encourages you, the viewer and user, to reflect in multiple ways upon your own experience of backyards and to build new connections between private and public space. By linking our individual backyards to the backyards of others, we began to see new levels of what community and community learning means.

Backyard is not only the plot of land or concrete balcony extending from our dwelling places, but it is a shared collection of our communal experiences within that space. As you travel through our backyards, you may discover connections we made in your own personal way. Whether you are a novice or an experienced traveler, we hope you will find our backyard a stimulating experience.

Backyard is a video, text, and sound exploration of our backyards using a multimedia tool for chunking, categorizing, and analyzing information, called Constellations. Constellations was created at the MIT Media Lab by Dr. Goldman-Segall, with David Greschler and Vivian Orni Mester, and then redesigned in MERLin. The graduate students of this class contributed their ideas to the construction of a window for building stories, or constellations, from the wide variety of chunks, or stars as we like to call them.