The INCOSE Vision 2025, “A World in Motion,” traces throughout its narrative the inescapable interaction of systems engineering with “social systems.” It advocates the expansion of systems engineering involvement into such systems. It even lists, “Applying systems engineering to help shape policy related to social and natural systems” as one …

In any system design project there are always three systems of importance. The first of these is what we call the system of interest or the solution system. That is the system we intend to design. (Note: For the purposes of this discussion, the name “system of interest” may be …

We often talk about understanding the three systems involved in the design space: the system under design, the context system, and the designing system. These three systems are depicted in Figure 1 from Vitech’s MBSE Primer, shown below. As the illustration makes clear, not only does the design team need …