The Active Medium: A Conceptual and Practical Architecture for Direct Manipulation

This paper presents a precise but general architecture (UMA) which attempts to resolve two critical and conflicting qualities of graphical user interfaces: directness and separation. This is achieved by placing centrai emphasis on the medium of interaction, and making this active through a dedicated user agent. This active medium allows surface interaction — application-independent manipulation of medium objects by the user. A major strength of UMA is that it is both a conceptual and an implementation architecture, and therefore is both intuitive to the user and the application designer, and effective in rationalising the separate construction and execution of the user interface and the application.

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