Ultra-structure: a design theory for complex systems and processes

Authors:
Jeffrey G. Long;Dorothy E. Denning
Affiliations:
George Washington Univ., Washington, DC;Georgetown University, Washington, DC
Venue:
Communications of the ACM
Year:
1995

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Abstract

The physicist and Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine states that “our understanding of nature is undergoing a radical change toward the multiple, the temporal, and the complex. Curiously, the unexpected complexity found in nature has not led to a slowdown in the progress of science, but on the contrary to the emergence of new conceptual structures that now appear as essential to our understanding of the physical world” [11]. We believe the challenges posed by complex systems arise primarily from the use of conceptual structures that worked well for static systems but do not work as well for more dynamic systems. We therefore propose new conceptual structures based on a different metaphysical view of the nature of complex systems.