this paper, I review the history of HCI as steps toward a science of design. My touchstone is Simon's (1969) provocative book he Sciences of the Artificial. The book pre-dates HCI, and many of its specific characterizations and claims about design are no longer authoritative (see Ehn, 1988). Nevertheless, two of Simon's themes echo through the history of HCI, and still provide guidance for charting its continuing development

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ing combines and transforms events coming from the presentation techniques into higher level events for higher abstractions. Conversely, concretizing decomposes and transforms high level information into low level information. The lowest level of the dialogue controller is in contact with the presentation techniques provided by the toolkit. This boundary is a rather fuzzy frontier. In general, user interface toolkits such as the X Intrinsics, provide an abstraction mechanism for defining new interaction techniques. However, it is not always possible to build new interaction techniques from the predefined building blocks of the toolkit. For example, in an earlier version of the X intrinsics, interaction techniques would occupy rectangular areas only. In such conditions, the notion of a wall in a floor plan drawing editor, could not be implemented as a diagonal line widget. Instead, a presentation object "wall" would be defined as a new abstraction in the dialogue controller portion. Thi...

This article presents an abstract space of dimensions which characterize the behavior of applications (i.e. functional cores) with regard to UIMS components. These dimensions such as responsiveness, accessibility, and instantiability, constitute a conceptual framework which captures the notion of functional core in terms adequate for UIMS designers. The dimension space may also be viewed as a requirements list for designing new UIMSs as well as a set of criteria for evaluating existing UIMSs. KEYWORDS: Application interface, UIMS, classification, dimension space. INTRODUCTION The terms application and User Interface Management System (UIMS) cover multiple meanings and different levels of software services. Generally speaking, an application corresponds to the whole interactive system with which a user can accomplish a set of tasks specific to a particular domain. In the context of software architecture, the application denotes the functional core of the interactive system: it is the...

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