ABSTRACT
The issue of emergence and emergent properties of systems has been (and, to some extent, still is) the subject of discussion within the systems engineering community.1 We shall take a very simple and straightforward view of this, consistent with our understanding of a system as a mode of description: Consider an engineered object and a description of it in terms of a system, that is, as a set of interacting elements. Then the emergent properties of the system are those that are not present if the interactions between the elements are inhibited. That is, emergent properties are only defined relative to a particular description of an object as a
system. In the case of the description of an object as a single element there are no emergent properties; all the properties of the object are simply that.
