Some musings on four ways humans couple: implications for systems design

Humans interact with their environments in many ways, and that interaction has become the focus of ever-greater interest as technology empowers the physical environment with new sensor and computer-based intelligence. This paper describes four different types of coupling between the human and environment, where "coupling" here refers to two-way interactions which are sufficiently tight that causality between human and environment is obscure and even arbitrary. These are not four mutually exclusive categories, but rather four ways of characterizing the relationship between the human and environment. Some generalizations of these relationships are discussed, along with hints on how we might improve our designs of intelligent technology, especially the interfaces to human users