From the course: Design Thinking, Social Innovation, and Complex Systems

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Understanding nested systems

Understanding nested systems

From the course: Design Thinking, Social Innovation, and Complex Systems

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Understanding nested systems

- Appreciating the fundamental characteristics of complex systems will make you a better designer. If you think about systems as existing at all levels of human interaction nested within and between each other, you can better appreciate trends in society as patterns of behavior that occur everywhere from family dynamics to national politics. Let's dig deeper into this idea. Systems are composed of four basic categories, elements, interactions between those elements, a function or a purpose, and a boundary. So whether we look at a plant cell, an extended family, a soccer team, or an entire community, we can identify elements, interactions, a function or a purpose, and a boundary. The purpose or function of the system has a major role in defining not only the nature of the boundary, but the nature of the interactions. Think about a room of people who are given different prompts every few minutes, either tell a joke or a…

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