Environments for Cooperating Agents: Designing the Interface as Medium

Various interface styles suggest paradigms for understanding interaction. Direct manipulation (DM) suggests the interface as a passive entity, providing tools for the user to control. Intelligent interfaces suggest instead an active interface, a colleague which (or even who) cooperates with the user on the task in hand. Each of these paradigms seems useful in different contexts. Matters become more complex when we consider systems with multiple applications or multiple users. We can no longer see the interface as part of a two-participant dialogue, involving human and computer. Instead, we look towards an environment where several active participants — some human, some automatic — cooperate.