Adding Colour to the Workstation Environment

Colour is an increasingly common feature of computer workstations. New ideas, algorithms and knowledge are needed to harmonize the user's desire for improved aesthetic appeal and the programmer's desire for an interface of greater functionality. This paper discusses several areas in which colour leads to novel functionality, visual search , grouping by colour and colour coding. The current obstacles to wider use of these effects are scientific : research is needed to develop colour specifications that allow their precise exploitation. As soon as they are overcome, however, conflicts between aesthetic and functional use of colour will become important. The solution of that problem will require a much better understanding of visual context. Visual context is especially important for window systems, the user interface of choice on modem workstations, since it is desirable that applications should be able to run unaware of other applications with which they share the display surface. If the window system can create a separate visual context for each application many colour problems are solved, but not all. Non-local properties of colour may still require information sharing among applications .