Systems Design External Resources

Title	Excerpt	Link
Complex Engineered Systems	Future scientific and technological developments in many fields will necessarily depend upon coming to grips with complex systems. Such systems are complex in both their composition (typically many different kinds of components interacting with each other and their environments on multiple levels) and in the rich diversity of behavior of which they are capable.	View Paper
Co-Creation & the New Landscapes of Design	Designers have been moving increasingly closer to the future users of what they design and the next new thing in the changing landscape of design research has become co-designing with your users. But co-designing is actually not new at all, having taken distinctly different paths in the US and in Europe.	View Paper
Self-Assembly, Self-Organization	Put the different parts of a car in a big box, and shake the whole, will you get a car? This image is often used to express what self-assembly can achieve. Spontaneous arrangements of small building blocks in ordered patterns or structures are ubiquitous in living systems, and they are crucial for designing at the nanoscale, where human hands and tools are helpless.	View Paper
The Social Internet of Things	Recently there has been quite a number of independent research activities that investigate the potentialities of integrating social networking concepts into Internet of Things (IoT) solutions. The resulting paradigm, named Social Internet of Things (SIoT), has the potential to support novel applications and networking services for the IoT in more eective and ecient ways.	View Paper
Innovation in Networked Infrastructures	Infrastructures are the systems that provide energy and water, that remove waste water and wastes, that facilitate the movement of people and goods, and that enable us to communicate and exchange information without being troubled by distance. Infrastructure systems are designed to satisfy specific social needs, but they shape social change at a much broader and more complex level.	View Paper
Introducing Inverse Infrastructures	The current dominant paradigm of contemporary infrastructure1 design is that of Hughesian large-scale technical systems (LTSs) (Hughes 1983). However, we see unprecedented infrastructures emerging that are not owned by governments or large businesses. They are not governed centrally or controlled top-down by government or industry as telecommunications, energy networks, and railways, for example, have been for decades. Instead	View Paper
Path Dependence in Technologies & Organizations	The note on which an entry for the Palgrave Encyclopedia of Strategic Management will draw offers a beginner’s guide to path dependency in technologies and organizations. We address the very meaning of the concept and its centrality in various aspects of economic analysis. We outline the various levels of the economic system where it is observable, its sources, consequences and different formal representations of path dependent processes.	View Paper
Emergence Versus Self-Organisation	A clear terminology is essential in every research discipline. In the context of ESOA, a lot of confusion exists about the meaning of the terms emergence and self-organisation. One of the sources of the confusion comes from the fact that a combination of both phenomena often occurs in dynamical systems.	View Paper
Understanding Complex Systems: Infrastructure Impacts	Prior to the 1990s, little attention was given to infrastructure interdependencies. However, recent events such as the Baltimore Howard Street Tunnel train derailment, the Northeast electric power blackout and hurricane Katrina, have brought the importance of infrastructure interdependencies to the forefront.	View Paper
Complex Systems & Systems Engineering	One may define a complex system as a system in which phenomena emerge as a consequence of multiscale interaction among the system’s components and their environments. The field of Complex Systems is the study of such systems—usually naturally occurring, either biological or social.	View Paper
Complex Engineered Systems: A New Paradigm	Human history is often seen as an inexorable march towards greater complexity — in ideas, artifacts, social, political and economic systems, technology, and in the structure of life itself. While we do not have detailed knowledge of ancient times, it is reasonable to conclude that the average resident of New York City today faces a world of much greater complexity than the average denizen of Carthage or Tikal.	View Paper
How to Design Self-Organizing Systems	The behavior of a self-organizing system (SOS) is typically defined by the local interaction rules of the components. While this emergent behavior typically is very flexible, i.e., working at different scales being robust against disturbances and failures, there exists no straight-forward way for the design of these rules so that the overall system shows the desired properties.	View Paper