An extremely interesting, relevant and dense presentation by Yaneer Bar-Yam on complex system: www.necsi.edu/events/vidlib/...

I personally believe what we (as in makers of digital systems and services) have a lot to learn from complex systems, chaos theory and dynamical systems (e.g solving problems for large living dynamic organisms); rather than traditional design practices and factory mentality (constructing objects).

Below quote from the presentation (the last 50 second of the video) for sure taps into how to conduct a quality driven and healthy design process to solve a problem:

“The question is: when we are working on any particular problem, we eventually will adopt a particular formalism for describing a particular set of equations; which will be diffraction equations, statistics, networks or something. How do we avoid that?

The answer is: because we have circumstances where the assumptions need not apply, we constantly have to challenge our assumption to understand what is the right representation for the problem and that ultimately is the key to getting the right answer. In the traditional view we simply always wrote down the same assumptions and we took them for granted. Now we have to make sure the assumptions hold and that will enable us to do the right thing.”