The development of amenity systems

This paper discusses the design techniques that will be essential to drive the rapid and continuous growth foreseen for information and communication systems over the next decade and beyond. Such systems are classed as amenity systems, implying that their use is as transparent as possible for the user. Two key design lissues are those of hiding the exponentially increasing compllexity of amenity systems, and of making the interaction between user and system as simple as possible. These design issues, and approaches to their solution, are discussed in tile paper.