A Science of Generic Design:
Managing Complexity Through Systems Design

John N. Warfield (Iowa State University Press, 1994)

John Warfield’s book, A Science of Generic Design, is an interesting and fun look at how “traditional” systems theorists and cyberneticians view the task of designing complex systems. Warfield’s models and methodologies focus on the conceptual design stage, where requirements are identified and a general system architecture (system components are their interactions) are specified. This occurs prior to detailed design, where domain-specific knowledge is applied to specify the system design to its context.

Warfield is University Professor and Director of the Institute for Advanced Study in the Integrative Sciences at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. He was trained as an electrical engineer and has served as editor of IEEE Tranasactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics. This type of background should clue the reader into what’s in store. Warfield is a guru among the systems and cybernetics crowd, and the book is a strong and fairly complete representation of that discipline’s approach to complex systems design.

As Warfield puts it, “the purpose of the book is to present a thorough discussion of the management of complexity through system design.” He does so through the lens of sociotechnical systems theory. Warfield first describes design science as being composed of general design science, generic design science (the focus of the book), and specific design sciences. Warfield then presents the foundation, theory, and methodology of generic design. There are then a number of applications that Warfield has facilitated through his career, including a fisheries example that is very interest- i n g. A number of different (existing) tools are presented, such as systems modeling, relationship diagrams, the nominal group technique, etc.

Generic design draws from two general laws: the law of limits (all activities have associated limits), and the law of gradation (any conceptual body of knowledge can be graded in stages); and from four intrinsic laws: the law of success and failure (success can be unambiguously determined), the law of requisite variety (the complexity of the system must match the complexity of the environment), the law of requisite parsimony (e.g., bounded rationality of humans), and the law of requisite saliency (designs must consider tradeoffs). From these, 16 “principles of generic design” are derived, including “the principle of formal iteration” and “the principle of actor-role congruence.”

Reading the book is like looking over the shoulder of a great generalist. The book is filled with ideas that Warfield has discussed throughout his career. The book reads like an interesting conversation, as opposed to a highly structured proposal for action. Warfield, like much of the traditional systems theory paradigm, touches on everything under the sun, including “universal priors,” “the foundations of science,” and decision analysis. His attempt is to be comprehensive, and in a manner that might offend some readers, complete. His writing and rhetorical style is much like Buckminster Fuller’s; in fact, it was very surprising not to find Fuller in the bibliography.

From a complexity standpoint, the book serves as an interesting contrast to the principles of design adopted by complexity theorists and application specialists such as John Holland, Kevin Kelly, Jeff Goldstein, or Ralph Stacey. There are many points of departure between complexity as defined from a more modern perspective, and complexity from the perspective of traditional systems theorists; readers sympathetic towards the former may find offense in some of the assumptions made in the book. For example, there is an underlying assumption that symbolic formalism is necessary to deal with complex systems design, because of the inadequacies of natural language. In this manner, symbolic formalism is seen as a requisite, rather than as a schematic constraint as others might see it. According to the law of requisite variety, the complexity of the design must match the complexity of the task; I would argue that language itself is in fact our most complex design formalism.

This book does not deal with the design of emergent systems; and, in doing so, ignores the emergent elements of any complex (human) system. In many ways, from a practical standpoint, this mimics the problems seen in the widespread practice of business reengineering. While the business process itself can be viewed through “mechanistic” lenses, and a top- down systems design methodology, such as outlined here, can formulate the logic of a new process, it ignores the fact that the social component of the process is not mechanistic and is not amenable to such design processes. Reengineering doesn’t work because the redesign efforts ignore the emergent properties of human systems; it lacks a bottom-up approach to transforming the human system. Likewise, Warfield’s science of generic design may work well on various mechanistic elements of a complex system, but, by ignoring emergence and self-organization, it is incomplete. Nevertheless, the book serves as a comprehensive overview of the cybernetic, sociotechnical systems approach, and is interesting reading because of the vast experience and insight of its author.

KEVIN DOOLEY