The first appearance in the open literature of a report (S.L. Newscome et al., Design Theory '88, 1989) on the National Science Foundation's (NSF's) new program in design theory and methodology is taken as an opportunity to track the development of this area. An attempt is made to identify unifying cross-disciplinary themes. It is argued that design theory, when looked at properly, has much in common with system theory when that is taken to mean some very general areas of decision making, knowledge representation, and combinatorial mathematics. From this perspective, design theory is quite congruent with many activities that have been in place for years.>

The potential utility of dividing the information flowing from computer to human among several sensory modalities is investigated by means of a rigorous experiment which compares the effectiveness of auditory and visual cues in the performance of a visual search task. The results indicate that a complex auditory cue can be used to replace cues traditionally presented in the visual modality. Implications for the design of multimodal workstations are discussed.