ABSTRACT
At its heart, this is a book about design. This stands to reason since a prominent word in its title is “engineering.” Design is the province of much of engineering. While some engineers design physical products (e.g., computers, automobiles, bridges), others design systems. Having said that, we must briefly clarify the concept of a system. While the prevailing notion of a system is that it is “more than the sum of its parts,” we can perhaps be a little clearer than that. One of the most concise and useful definitions of a system, in our minds, was offered some years ago by the Nobel-prizewinning economist Herb Simon, who stated that a system is comprised of a “number of parts that interact in a non-simple way.” The “nonsimple-ness” (i.e., complexity) of the interaction of the parts is the hallmark of a system, and what leads to the “more than the sum of its parts” notion of how a system operates (Simon, 1962).
