@stevekrouse and Vlad Magdalin (not here at least under that name), what breadth and depth in the Podcast https://futureofcoding.org/episodes/035 this week! What is planning? (A: "Rules for a computer to follow.") What is direct manipulation in contrast to liveness? Got me thinking. I propose a new term "direct attention" to help draw attention to the nuance of manipulation. Consider this: much of what we call direct manipulation is not as direct as it seems. In some sense, drawing on a screen with a mouse or trackpad is not nearly as direct as sculpting clay. The tool, the control surface, is removed from the material being manipulated. And it's not that fingers are always more direct else why would anyone want a stylus for a tablet? In that case, fingers are getting in the way of something. Of what? Our attention. With a stylus, most can more easily attend to the work. Most, but not all. For the disabled or a young child, the pencil will be less direct rather than more. And it works the other way too. Experience, training, habit changes the fluidity of things. Some are comfortable with email as a locus (or Skype) over AirDrop. Language, natural language, is humanity's most significant attention modifier: spoken language more naturally, written language through learning and practice with its attendant flexibility and abstraction. A master, through the technology in his or her mind, may be more at home, more readily able to manipulate the abstraction than medium, perhaps to the point of becoming disconnected from the substrate. (An anecdote involving Beethoven comes to mind.) And at that point, I suppose the interface has become a new material and ultimately a thoroughly subjective one.

i think the term “direct manipulation” is necessarily graded. pencil and paper is more direct than a stylus is more direct than a mouse is more direct than a keyboard for drawing a picture. i like the idea of breaking up “manipulation” into various constituents to better analyze this.

Both manipulation and observation (a better word than attention). Manipulation is what you're touching, saying. Observation is what you're seeing, hearing.

actually i like attention! observation sounds too passive imo. i might call the other half “direct action / direct modification” bc manipulation sounds kind of two directional, “control”, and plus no reason to overload the term. or maybe just “direct input” and “output”

This is what George Lakoff has to say about Direct Manipulation in _Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things_:

Prototypical causation appears to be direct manipulation, which is characterized most typically by the following cluster of interactional properties:

1. There is an agent that does something.

2. There is a patient that undergoes a change to a new state.

3. Properties 1 and 2 constitute a single event; they overlap in time and space; the agent comes in contact with the patient.

4. Part of what the agent does (either the motion or the exercise of will) precedes the change in the patient.

5. The agent is the energy source; the patient is the energy goal; there is a transfer of energy from agent to patient.

6. There is a single definite agent and a single definite patient.

7. The agent is human.

8. a. The agent wills his action.

b. The agent is in control of his action.

c. The agent bears primary responsibility for both his action and the change.

9. The agent uses his hands, body, or some instrument.

10. The agent is looking at the patient, the change in the patient is perceptible, and the agent perceives the change.

The most representative examples of humanly relevant causation have all ten of these properties.

He doesn't talk about direct manipulation in the context of human-computer interaction, but on a more generic level when discussing how humans perceive cause and effect. In that sense I don't think it's particularly relevant what the tools are we use (see 9), as long as we have a strong feeling for causing the effect we're intending (4, 8, and 10).