Donna H. Rhodes Massachusetts Institute of Technology 77 Massachusetts Avenue Building NE20, Room 388 Cambridge, MA 02139 [email protected] Abstract As the engineering workforce ages, skills with long development periods are lost with retiring individuals faster than are younger engineers developing the skills. Systems thinking is one such skill. Recent research, (Davidz 2006), has shown the impor...

Systems thinking in practice is a heuristic framework based upon ideas of boundary critique for guiding the use and development of tools from different traditions in managing complex realities. Three interrelated features of the framework are drawn out – contexts of systemic change, practitioners as change agents, and tools as systems constructs that can themselves change through adaptation. A ...

The systems thinking literature assumes that the concept of a system is useful in management and organizational research. Ralph D. Stacey and his collaborators, however, have questioned this. They have presented the theory of complex responsive processes (CRP) as an alternative to systems thinking. We argue that systems thinking and the CRP perspective are complementary. The CRP illuminates man...

This conceptual paper is cross-disciplinary, based on systems thinking and organisational learning theories. The paper examines critical development of the systems theory from hard systems thinking to soft systems thinking, the latter being the foundation of the organisational learning theory. Especially, this paper explores one key imperative of learning organisations: empowerment, which is cl...

This mainly speculative paper describes the activities of the Discovery in Design (DiD): Peoplecentred Computational Issues (DiD) Cluster which has been established under the UK AHRC and EPSRC ‘Design for the 21 st Century’ Initiative (D21C). The objectives of this initiative are to promote the formation of new communities of design researchers, practitioners and end users and to build a common...

INTRODUCTION In recent years, statistical reasoning (SR), statistical literacy (SL) and statistical thinking (ST) have been declared as the three overarching goals of modern statistics teaching (see for example, Ben-Zvi & Garfield, 2004). In many countries, e.g., in Germany, these goals involve a considerable change from teaching probability to teaching statistics. Hence, Garfield (2002) mentio...

Hardware and software design requires the right portion of skills and mental faculties. The design of a good system is an exercise in rational thinking, engineering, and art. The design process is further complicated when we aspire to build systems that exploit parallelism or are targeted to be deployed on architecturally diverse computing devices, FPGAs or GPUs to name just a few. The need to ...

Hardware and software design requires the right portion of skills and mental faculties. The design of a good system is an exercise in rational thinking, engineering, and art. The design process is further complicated when we aspire to build systems that exploit parallelism or are targeted to be deployed on architecturally diverse computing devices, FPGAs or GPUs to name just a few. The need to ...

Affiliations: 1Institute of Complex Systems and Mathematical Biology, University of Aberdeen, United Kingdom; 2Centre for BioNano Interactions, School of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, University College Dublin, Belfield, Ireland; 3School of Physics, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland; and 4Institute for Molecular Bioscience, Division of Cell Biology and Molecular Medicine, The Univers...