System-environment view in designing

Abstract

A system interacts with its environment to satisfy requirements. Therefore, designing should involve developing the concept of both the system and its surrounding. A comprehensive review of literature on designing to analyse the use of system-environment view in designing revealed that while the concept of systems is used, implicitly or explicitly, by many design models, the concept of environment is rarely used as an evolvable construct in designing. Based on this, a system-environment view has been proposed in this paper that consists of: System, Subsystem, Elements, Environment and Relationships; each of these constructs is explicit and evolvable during design. The proposed system-environment view is empirically validated using protocol studies of design sessions, which were undertaken before this view was developed. The validation involved checking whether or not all the constructs in the system-environment view are naturally present, in these design sessions. An example of system-environment co-evolution during designing is also presented to show the importance of considering environment as an explicit, evolvable construct in models of designing. © Springer-Verlag London 2013.