One viewpoint quantifies the worth of a system by actual or expected Quality, Parsimony and Beauty. Quality in the Phil Crosby sense as "conformance to requirements." Parsimony meaning no sufficient alternative requires less goods in the economic and ecologic sense. Beauty, in the sense of Gelertner's Machine Beauty, Basic Books, 1998.   

Now comes news in  the August proceedings of ACM's SIGGRAPH, The Sum of Your Facial Parts,
that a focus group of men and women selected the most attractive faces from a sample set then researchers at Tel Aviv University distilled 234 significant measurements between facial features, including the distances between lips and chin, the forehead and the eyes, and between the eyes. They devised an algorithm that altered an image according to agreed-upon standards of attractiveness while producing a result that left the face completely recognizable. &am ...

http://www.pbsrg.com/overview/cib-task-group-61/annual-meeting/

The Performance Based Studies Research Group at Arizona State University is hosting Task Group 61 of the "International Council for Research and Innovation in Building and Construction." The CIB provides a global network for international exchange and cooperation in research and innovation in building and construction, in support of an improved building process and of improved performance of the built environment.

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. &l ...

Inventing means designing (described by regular COFES participant, David Ullman, P.E., Ph.D., and CEO as "the elaboration of information punctuated by decision).

Innovating means helping others appreciate and leverage your design.

As a VP at 3M noted, Invention turns money into ideas. Innovation turns ideas into money.

Our understanding of the fundamentals of both has increased considerably in this decade through research on how we think, c.f., "The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind's Hidden Complexities" by Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner. 

Now we can harness the advances in digital electronics, software and social dynamics to take design to the next level. Challenges of&nbs ...

At http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/science/07-08GreenLightProj.asp you are forewarned that the information technology industry consumes as much energy and has roughly the same carbon “footprint” as the airline industry. Then you can read what UC San Diego is doing.

A recent CfP stated "Model-Driven Engineering is about creating, transforming, generating, interpreting, weaving models using modelling languages, tools, etc."

Made me wonder where the problem statement came from that triggers such engineering.

Does the author mean Model-Building Engineering (as in We Are Driven) instead of Model-driven?

If the author described MDE properly, then in what ways is model-based systems engineering, MBSE, distinct from this MDE?

And should we first model the problematic siituation in order to make sure that the engineering effort addresses the right problem?

I like David G. Ullman’s definition of design, “Elaboration of information punctuated by decision.” The current era of CAD helps designers once their decisions are made and it is time to record the results.

Current CAD also helps evaluate decision options, also called tradeoffs. The forthcoming era of computer-aided creativity or computer-aided invention will help designers much earlier in a project. The Three P’s are one way to think about this: possibilities, probabilities, and pursuits. Possibilities are the kinds of ideas produced by brainstorming, nominal group technique, idea writing and similar methods. Probabilities are the possibilities that survive analysis and assessment. Pursuits are the elaborations of the one to three mo ...