A. Wayne Wymore: Designer

“Over 80 million people have participated in Cub Scout Pinewood Derbies. Pinewood is a case study of the design of a Cub Scout Pinewood Derby for one particular scout pack. The system helps manage the entire race from initial entry through final results. Many alternatives for race format, scoring, and judging are presented.”

A. Wayne Wymore

Source: Engineering Modeling and Design (1992), p. 83; As cited in: Eric David Smith (2006, p. 42).

People , Study , Help , Scouting

“[The process of system design is]… consisting of the development of a sequence of mathematical models of systems, each one more detailed than the last.”

A. Wayne Wymore

A. Wayne Wymore (1970) Systems Engineering Methodology. Department of Systems Engineering, The University of Arizona, p. 14/2; As cited in: J.C. Heckman (1973) Locating traveler support facilities along the interstate system--a simulation using general systems theory. p. 43.

Mathematics

“In the minds of many writers systems engineering is synonomous with component selection and interface design; that is, the systems engineer does not design hardware but decides what types of existing hardware shall be coupled and how they shall be coupled. Complete agreement that this function is the essence of systems engineering will not be found here, for, besides the very important function of systems engineering in systems analysis, there is the role played by systems engineering in providing boundary conditions for hardware design.”

A. Wayne Wymore

Source: A Mathematical Theory of Systems Engineering (1967), p. 193.

“[In the year 1957] I have just returned from an exciting meeting of the American Society for Engineering Education where I heard a paper on the new discipline of systems engineering. It is no longer sufficient for engineers merely to design boxes such as computers with the expectation that they would become components of larger, more complex systems. That is wasteful because frequently the box component is a bad fit in the system and has to be redesigned or worse, can lead to system failure. We must learn how to design large-scale, complex systems from the top down so that the specification for each component is derivable from the requirements for the overall system. We must also take a much larger view of systems. We must design the man-machine interfaces and even the system-society interfaces. Systems engineers must be trained for the design of large-scale, complex, man-machine-social systems.”

A. Wayne Wymore

Systems Movement: Autobiographical Retrospectives (2004)

Education , Failure , Learning , Training

“The problem of the design of a system must be stated strictly in terms of its requirements, not in terms of a solution or a class of solutions.”

A. Wayne Wymore

A Wayne. Wymore (2004) " The nature of research in systems engineering http://sse.stevens.edu/fileadmin/cser/2004/papers/211-Paper119.pdf"; As cited in: Eric David Smith (2006) Tradeoff Studies and Cognitive Biases. p. 31.

Problem