Well-Designed Systems

All well-designed systems share several features in common.  These features exist on well-designed systems of any kind, whether systems of rules for games or sports, mechanical systems in the machines that power our everyday life, legal and regulatory systems, or software and computer systems.  These features ensure that a system can meet its design requirements and give well-designed systems resilience and longevity as they are applied to real-world situations.

Clear Goals

Well-designed systems range from quite simple or extremely detailed and complex.  In complex systems with many rules and moving parts, clear goals ensure that all the parts work toward a coherent end.  With clear goals, system designers can check each part, each detail of the system and verify that they all work to accomplish the system goals.

In addition to aligning details and subsystems, clear goals allow system designers to choose where those details are necessary, and where added complexity does not improve the system as a whole.  Additional parts or rules which do not advance the system goals are not only superfluous and unnecessary but are actively detrimental to the success of a system.  Any effort by people who use a system that does not work toward accomplishing the system’s goals is wasted effort.

Finally, when a system’s goals are not only clear but explicit, the value of the system to society can be actively tracked.  When we know clearly and precisely what a system is meant to accomplish, we can modify or discard that system when its goals no longer align with our larger societal goals.  Without clear goals, retiring out-of-date systems is a much murkier process.

Useful Incentives

Well-designed systems are chiefly characterized by their incentives aligning well with their goals.  In addition to being aligned with goals, incentives should also be useful or desirable.  While a system can function with useless incentives, as users of the system will still want it to work so that it accomplishes its goals, systems with well-aligned and useful incentives are far more successful.

Useful incentives serve primarily to drive adoption of and compliance with the system.   If a system user finds using the system beneficial in and of itself in addition to accomplishing the system’s goals, that user is far more likely to make effective and frequent use of the system.

Capacity for Tuning and Adjustment

Eventually, every system must leave the design folder and exist in the real world.  When it does, two things immediately happen.  First, all the assumptions and calculations that went into its design are tested, and second, regardless of how accurate those assumptions and calculations turned out to be, they begin to become out of date.

Well-designed systems combat both effects by building in some means of adjustment into their design.  Good means of adjustment are easy to understand for people who are not systems designers and who do not have an intimate understanding of the details of the design.  Good adjustments also allow for both fine and coarse changes to system functions.

Well-designed systems can be adjusted after deployment to adapt to a changing environment and changing priorities surrounding the system’s goals, which will enhance the systems effectiveness and longevity.  Reality is ever-changing, and well-designed systems need to be able to adapt to change without a fundamental re-design.