 In this lesson, we're going to start the course off by taking a look at the bigger picture that is the environment or context within which we design and develop systems in the 21st century. Many factors point to the conclusion that we live in a time of transition, an unprecedented change. This change is both fundamental, rapid, and multi-dimensional. The overarching paradigm that is often used to understand this change is that of a transition from an industrial age to a post-industrial information age. We inherit a world of technologies and systems of organization that were born out of the Industrial Revolution, where the newfound knowledge of modern science was applied to engineering and developing the technologies required to support a new form of mass society. Mass society, unlike its predecessors, is focused upon the mass of people and thus required the development of engineered systems on an unprecedented scale. Key to achieving this was standardization, systematization, and economics of scale through centralization. The world we inherit is dominated by these large centralized systems of organization, such as governments, factories, and corporations. Inherent to this centralized model is the dichotomy between producers and consumers of products and services. Systems are designed and developed by a minority of professionals who create finished products that are pushed out to end users. The industrial model is focused upon the provision of tangible objects. These goods are designed as finished products that operate in relative isolation from each other and follow a linear life cycle from production to consumption and disposal. Lastly, these products have been largely designed and produced for the less than 20% of the world's population that forms part of the global middle class. We can say that the industrial model has been largely successful in what it was designed to achieve, the provision of a relatively high level of material standard of living for the mass of people within advanced industrial economies. We can also say this industrial model is well developed and due to its success is being exported or duplicated on a global basis. We can now move financial capital and the expertise to produce skyscrapers, motorways, and airports almost anywhere on the planet, from Shenzhen to Lagos. But as we transit further into the 21st century, a number of factors are working to reveal the inherent limitation to this model. We will now discuss the key drivers that are taking us into a more complex environment within which we have to design systems for in the 21st century. Primary among these are the rise of the paradigm of sustainability, the rapid and pervasive growth in information technology, the huge growth in the services economy, and the expansion of economic globalization. Firstly, sustainability. The growing awareness to the need for sustainability can be derived from a very simple equation that is a default position within the industrial model. Exponential growth within a linear system that is dependent upon finite resources is unsustainable. For this system to continue into the future, some part of this equation has to change. Exponential growth in the consumption in resources will almost certainly continue as the majority of the world population continues to come into the global economy. The availability of resources will unlikely change in a positive direction, achieving sustainability will involve many things, but shifting from a linear to a nonlinear model will be at the heart of it. Developing the next generation of sustainable technologies is not about making more things that are faster, bigger, and better. It requires us to design systems that is create synergistic connection between things that overcomes the dead end effect of the linear model. Environmental change is another aspect to sustainability, one that is taking us into a more volatile and uncertain environment, in response to which our traditional approach of developing static systems for stable and predictable environments is inept, as we need to develop systems that are more agile, flexible, and capable of adaptation. Secondly, information technology. The information revolution is having a deep and radical effect on almost all areas of society and technology, enabling new forms of networked organization as systems become unbundled from being monolithic, structured, and static, to becoming increasingly distributed, dynamic, and heterogeneous. IT places platforms that connect people to people, such as the World Wide Web, or technology to technology, such as the Internet of Things. At the center of the design challenges going forward, some of these platforms are true complex systems, consisting of millions or even billions of nodes that are densely interconnected, interacting, and are capable of adaptation as they evolve over time. Information technology is also having a strong democratizing effect on design, as the tools for design and production are increasingly placed in the hands of many, the once formal world of professional design that was closed off in patents, is giving way to the emergence of ecosystems for co-creation, where the end user is becoming a new source for innovation. Thirdly, the services economy. The industrial model is primed for the production and distribution of tangible goods, but the past few decades has seen a huge growth in the services section of the economy. Today, services make up approximately two-thirds of the global economic output and dominate the advanced economies. Services are based upon a very different logic to products. Designing services is not about designing more things, it is about the function or service these things provide and about interconnecting these services into processes that are centered around the needs of the end user. We are moving into a world less about products and more about real-time, dynamic networks of services. Services are all about people. Most of the really hard issues going forward are not so much technical, they are social in nature. A well-designed, well-engineered and well-managed service system must be primarily centered and optimized around people, whether we're talking about a patient in a healthcare system, a customer of a business, or a citizen interacting with their government. This leads us to one of the key themes in the design of complex systems. That is what we call socio-technical systems. For reasons we will discuss later, the industrial world was not designed for people, it was designed for procedures, standards in systems, machines that were icons and idols of the industrial age, rational, stable, and predictable. Human beings were expected to just fit into this model. The net result of this is that we inherit a hugely alienating world that excludes the full engagement and resources of the social and cultural domain. We are only just starting to re-explore the huge potential they offer through such innovations as social networks. The world we will be designing for in the 21st century is more social. It is more personal and human. This social layer that is being placed over everything and how it interacts with the technical world of technology is another important theme we will be revisiting throughout the course. Lastly, economic globalization. To date, the majority of the products within the industrial capitalist system were designed for a small minority of the world's population living in advanced western economies. In these countries, the needs that capitalism has worked so hard to meet have been met. Meanwhile, in other parts of the world, basic human needs such as clean water and sanitation are not met. In an interconnected world like ours, this is increasingly an unstable situation. The formal model for design and development that is part of industrial capitalism has created a two-tier system in many parts of the developing world where either you're part of the middle class and you have access to market products, public utilities, legal rights and so on, or you're not and are simply left to improvise as is the case for over one billion people who live in slums around the world. One of the challenges to design going forward is an expanding formal design for all economic levels. This is not about charity. It's about innovation in product design and business models so as to be able to reach down to the very lowest economic levels and still achieve a viable return on investment and there are a growing number of businesses that are proving this is possible. The post-industrial world we live in is like waking up in the morning after a party with a hangover. We inherit a world where we live inside of massive inert industrial systems that are surrounded by challenges. The making of more products that are faster, stronger and bigger is becoming increasingly commoditized. Whilst a new world of value is opening up in the design of complex systems that connect pre-existing resources to provide users with solutions to these real-world problems. In summary then, we can say that the industrial model to systems design has been highly successful in developing a set of industrial technologies from microwaves to airplanes that allow us to have a much higher level of material well-being than was previously possible. But today we are presented with new challenges that require us to go beyond its logic. The need to design sustainable cities, health care services that enable people to live a better quality of life and large information systems. All of these present us with the challenge of developing complex systems and require a new paradigm in design.