As this book took form, its contents furnished the material for a
graduate course at the University of Rhode Island. Toward the end of
that course, the class reviewed the literature on display
characteristics and design. The universal criticism voiced in those
reviews was that there was lots of hardware information but no criteria
upon which one could base a sound design. Though one could learn all
about the size and brightness of various displays, one could not form
any judgment about how ef- fectively the display transferred information
to an observer. As I reviewed our nearly completed text, an announcement
crossed my desk stating that one of the professional societies in a
seminar was to consider if one should not attempt to formulate a theory
concerning information transfer from displays to an observer. That was
the first title chosen for our book, before our publisher told us that
"that was a paragraph, not a title. " The group of contributors to this
book have labored long in the conviction that there was a real need to
develop and present a consolidated theory based upon the work of a
number of pioneers, including Barnes and Czerny, de Vries, Rose, Coltman
and Anderson, Schade, Johnson, van Meeteren, and others, who established
the various parts of a substantial theoretical and experimental back-
ground that seemed ripe for consolidation.