Network planning for a public switched telephone network is essentially the same as the company's business strategy. The social environment providing the market for communications services is undergoing rapid change in Japan as it evolves from an era of one basic mainstay service-namely, plain-old telephone service-to one in which a wide range of advanced new services are, or soon will be, available and there is fierce competition to provide those services. This paper covers some of the thinking behind NTT's strategy to put in place a flexible and effectual network that fully reflects the needs and desires of customers in this fast-changing environment.

In the coming information society, people will have to be engaged in the information environment for their everyday activities. We propose a new design concept of Contextual Metaphors for constructing a human interface. It introduces multiple metaphors and makes it easy for people to directly participate into the environment. The major part of the concept is to provide good contextual support for their everyday activities with a layered design of three cognitively distinct concepts. They are the use of everyday based object metaphors, the task oriented assignment of each of metaphors to system functions and the scenario based sequencings of scenes of those metaphors. A prototyping of the concept showed effectiveness of the concept together with some remarks on the actual design.