Revisiting Simon on the Design of Complex Systems

The paper starts with a summary of systems concepts and goes on to distil the essence of Simon's notions on the design of complex systems. There is a reworking of Simon's watchmaker analogy which establishes the need for decomposition is systems design and implementation. The final part of the paper emphasizes the utility of these notions, but rejects the idea that the design process can be reduced to a mechanical procedure. Simon's ideas are relocated in a newer framework.