 In this module we'll be taking a look at the major trends that are working to shape our technological infrastructure and drive their increased complexity as we transit further into the 21st century. These major trends can be encapsulated within the overarching transition that advanced economies are currently going through from being industrial economies to post-industrial service and information economies. This is a major transformation to their deep structure and architecture, one that is happening at an unprecedented speed. Needless to say, the macro-environment of the 21st century is not one of standardized, predictable, business as usual. It is marked by what business analysts and management call the VUCA world, which is an acronym standing for Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity. A full analysis of this context is beyond the scope of this course. What we're interested in here is how this fundamental restructuring process plays out within our systems of technology. In order to get some kind of traction on these very big ideas, we'll break them down into four distinct vectors of change, including the rise of environmental awareness, the information revolution, economic globalization and the services revolution. Firstly, we'll talk about sustainability. When we're looking at the factors shaping the development of technology in the 21st century, one of the key factors is the paradigm of sustainability. The paradigm of sustainability describes a new way of seeing the world that has, over the past few decades, moved from the fringes to the center of our collective conscience. It recognizes the unsustainability of the industrial model to economic growth and the need for a fundamental transformation in our technological infrastructure. Environmental awareness and sustainability is the product of an equation that simply doesn't add up whichever way we look at it. It is the product of a nexus between diminuating supply of resources and environmental degradation on the one hand and a growing demand for energy and resources on the other, as the majority of the world's population comes into the global economy. Within just the next 15 years, the global middle class of consumers will approximately double to almost 5 billion. Sustainability is both a supply side and a demand side equation. On the supply side, it means accessing a wider spectrum of energy and materials in a multiplicity of different ways. A whole new set of technologies are emerging that go beyond the industrial paradigm to create a new distributed architecture to our infrastructure. Distributed generation, electrical vehicles, thin-filmed solar cells, organic farming and many other alternative technologies run contrary to the industrial age model of dependency upon a very limited set of energy sources at a mass scale. Our energy architecture to date has been significantly dependent upon the very high quality energy source of liquid petroleum. These alternative technologies are of a much lower energy quality, again driving this move towards distributed and pervasive energy sources as we expand the spectrum of input sources for energy. On the demand side, it means using these resources more efficiently, both on the micro level as energy efficiency is becoming a key consideration in the design of everything from light bulbs to washing machines and houses. But also on the macro scale, a sustainability is not the property of a thing. Things can't really be sustainable in isolation. It's about integrated systems, looking at how different systems interoperate and how to create synergies between them. This again is a major disruption to our traditional industrial model that is very much focused on optimizing subsystems in isolation. Key to achieving sustainability is the shift from a linear system to a non-linear, circular economy. And this is about seeing across domains and across levels to be able to create connections and processes for recycling material between disparate systems. Sustainability is a major transformative vector along which the technological substrate that supports our economies will be fundamentally altered as its whole architecture moves towards one that is cyclical instead of linear, likely to be running on a much lower grade of distributed and pervasive energy sources. It takes us into the world of complexity in that it requires us to include many more factors into the design of these technologies. Not just economic and technical factors, but now a whole new set of environmental factors. It also requires us to understand how the systems we develop integrate with other systems in their environment in order to achieve not only subsystem optimization, but efficiency on the macro scale, requiring an integrated and more holistic approach to design engineering of these technologies. The information revolution may have started out as just another extension of the industrial model with expensive, massive mainframe computers and highly centralized networks, but it's turned out to be very different. The revolution in information processing and telecommunications of the past few decades is having a fundamental and pervasive effect on all areas of society and its technological substrate. Ushering in a new architectural paradigm as our centralized hierarchical systems of industrial organization become unbundled and distributed out into networks. The process of industrialization was or is one of centralization and standardization in order to achieve the batch processing required for mass production, distribution and consumption. This mass centralizing process continues around the world today through rapid urbanization into so-called mega cities. But unlike the 19th and 20th century that were largely a one-directional process towards centralization, the 21st century has strong forces going in both directions, as on many levels information technology is having a radical redistribution effect. While on other levels traditional industrial processes of convergence and centralization continue at an unprecedented scale, not set to slow down for many decades. This is a key characteristic of complexity, that is a system composed of two irreducible components. 21st century technology and systems of organization are and will be at least partly characterized by this interplay of the two different patterns of organization, formal centralized organizations and distributed informal networks. Developing methods and design patterns to integrate the two is a key consideration going forward. As the exponential growth in processing power starts to slow down, the value of IT is moving up the value chain. Value is no longer gained so much from making computers faster and smaller, although this continues of course. It is instead, currently, moving up to the level of large information systems, in the form of big data, cloud computing, advanced analytics and the Internet of Things, all of which are at the forefront of the information revolution today. These technologies of cloud computing, advanced analytics, mobile computing and the Internet of Things are all converging as a major force shaping the technology landscape and it is happening rapidly as we speak. These technologies hold out huge potential to make our world smarter, more adaptive, efficient, process orientated and real time. But they also engender some of the most difficult engineering challenges and above all many risks which include increased unknown interdependencies as different systems converge upon common cloud platforms, mass automation with increased dependency upon automated algorithms and control systems, which raises many security concerns without even mentioning the social concerns. Information technology is another vector taking us into the world of complex engineered systems as they network our world making systems more adaptive, responsive and again distributed. Next we'll talk about economic globalization. Globalization is a very complex phenomena of which economic globalization is just one dimension which involves the proliferation of economic relations on a global basis. Through these relations our global economy becomes restructured away from being defined by a set of national economies and instead becomes a multi-dimensional set of global networks through which goods, services, people and capital can flow without restriction to anywhere that is integrated into the network. It is driven primarily by multinational corporations and in particular financial institutions that have been very effective in leveraging new information technologies. Modern industrial economies and their infrastructure were developed within the context of the nation state and were typically monopolistic and monolithic but globalization has driven the process of privatization within many post-industrial economies. From England to New Zealand infrastructure systems have become disaggregated, decoupled from the nation state and increasingly reintegrated into global networks that are managed by multinational corporations. This is resulting in a much more complex landscape with many different actors both private and public as infrastructure systems such as the telecommunications and power grids of Western Europe no longer stop at borders but increasingly form part of multinational networks composed of many different stakeholders. Advanced infrastructure in the age of globalization is no longer the exclusive domain of Western countries. Cities like Dubai and Shenzhen have shown that high quality infrastructure can be rapidly developed anywhere on the planet when given the right context and ingredients of sound political administration and financial viability then the technology and technical expertise can be relatively easily deployed on an unprecedented scale and speed. Lastly we'll talk about the rise of the services economy. The industrial age economy was one of mechanization and mass production of tangible products in order to provide the basic physical needs for a mass society. Within developed economies this basic need has in many ways been met with the middle class consumer now forming the large majority within these societies. The post industrial world is marked by a reduction in industrial production and a steep rise in the services sector. As manufactured goods have become commodities services have risen to dominate the developed economies through an ongoing process that we might call serviceization. Serviceizing is a transaction through which value is provided by a combination of products and services in which the satisfaction of the customer's needs is achieved either by selling the function of the product rather than the product itself or by increasing the service component of the product offered. Services are fundamentally different in nature to products whereas products are typically once off discrete physical objects. Services are instead intangible systems that integrate different products in order to provide a customer's solution often in the form of some kind of process that endures over time. The word service means the action of helping or doing work for someone and services are fundamentally about people. Today post industrial societies that have achieved a certain standard of material well-being are becoming more aware that what people really want from their economic infrastructure is not just high GDP but going beyond this to actual quality of life and well-being which is a much more complex thing which requires us to firstly actually recognize the social dimension to the whole situation and recognize that ultimately this is about providing services for a society that are affordable, accessible, available and acceptable to all. The rise of the services economy is another dimension to the growth and complexity of our engineered systems. It requires again that we build not just once-off technologies but integrated service systems to put people at the center of these service ecosystems and understand how to design the processes and integrated set of services required for them to achieve their well-being. Services require us not only to cut across domains to integrate disparate systems but more fundamentally to bridge the divide between the social and the technical. In summary then we've been taking a quick overview to the context and major trends that are fundamentally reshaping our economic infrastructure. We've talked about this process as a shift from an industrial economy to a post-industrial service and information economy. We've given an outline to four major trends that are part of this process including the rise of the paradigm of sustainability. It's focused on integrated systems that are required to enable the circular economy, the information revolution and how it's networking our world making it distributed, smarter and more responsive. We've briefly talked about economic globalization as it is work to disaggregate our once monolithic infrastructure systems and increasingly turn them into multinational multi-stakeholder networks. Lastly we look to the rise of the services economy as discrete technologies become integrated into service systems that are focused around the end user. Of course all of these trends are interconnected and interdependent. Globalization would not be happening without information technology. Serviceization is important to achieving sustainability and so on. But the net result of this is the emergence of the complex engineered systems that we'll be discussing during this course.