A user interface design pattern in which representations of objects are manipulated by interacting with the representation directly, rather than e.g. issuing commands with the object as the “direct object.” For example: in Sketchpad (Sutherland, I. E. (1963). Sketchpad: A man-machine graphical communication system. MIT.), you can move the vertices of a polygon by pointing at them and dragging—rather than issuing a “move vertex” command, then indicating a vertex. The latter model was dominant in early interfaces.
Direct manipulation was a hallmark of Smalltalk.
The term was coined by {Ben Shneiderman} in 1983.
Shneiderman, B. (1983). Direct Manipulation: A Step Beyond Programming Languages. Computer, 16(8), 57–69. https://doi.org/10.1109/MC.1983.1654471