As societies' problems increase in extent, variety and ambiguity, popularly (mis)labeled "complexity," the design profession is not keeping pace. Failed projects abound and leaders in both sponsor and responder communities seek to ignore the really "wicked" problems. The recent emphasis on System of Systems highlights the intellectual shortfall in dealing with complexity. This presents an emerging, billion dollar opportunity for new methods, techniques and tools for whole system design. Two facets are important. One concerns original and revision design. The other concerns assessment of the viability of the design, i.e., check your work. The latter is prudent at each stage of a whole system design, e.g., conceptual model, chronological model, architecture model, buildable model, as built, as deployed, and as (about to be) applied.

It is hard to assess the viability of a simple system, e.g., a computer program intended to run on a specified piece of hardware, because of the proliferation of cross connections in their descriptive model, the well known "combinatorial explosion" problem. Assessment of complex systems is economically infeasible if attempted with stored program computers.  Fortunately, new kinds of hardware architectures are appearing that enable recognition, classification and mesh-ability of patterns. This kind of hardware will open new paths for alert CAD vendors.