Educational content and educational project for system engineering. II. H.A. Simon´s proposals revisited

For pt. I see IEEE Int. Conf. on Syst., Man and Cybernetics (1996). The author discusses further consequences that the introduction of a project work activity could have on the contents of system engineering education. He develops his discussion of H.A. Simon´s proposals (“The sciences of the artificial”, MIT Press, 1969) which placed design as a major component of activity of engineers and more largely, of professionals. Design is certainly a major activity of engineers, if by design we understand conception and production of artefacts like technical objects, systems and organisations in the double sense of their material existence and of their representation. This activity is increasingly concerned with complexity that can be characterised by a large amount of data, a great mix between those data and uncertainty in evolution. So as to deal with this activity and to represent it in a convenient way for education, the system hypothesis can be considered to be the best way to reduce complexity without falsifying complexity. The paper discusses pedagogical ways to prepare engineering students for this design activity