Arthur D. Hall Quotes

Arthur David Hall III was an American electrical engineer and a pioneer in the field of systems engineering. He is known as author of a widely used engineering textbook "A Methodology for Systems Engineering" from 1962.Hall attended Brookville High School in Lynchburg, Virginia. He served in the Army during World War II. After the war he studied electrical engineering at Princeton University, graduating in 1949. He started his career as electrical engineer for Bell Labs, where he worked for many years. In the 1950s he started his own consulting business, and in the 1960s, Hall was faculty member at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania.

Hall was a founding member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. In 1965, Hall was the first editor of the IEEE Transactions on Systems Science and Cybernetics. Hall later became a senior IEEE fellow. He is listed in Who's Who Men of Science as the father of the "picture telephone", and creator of the patented "Auto Farm System", which provides global positioning equipment for precision farming. His further hobbies included flying, yachting, photography, and gardening. Wikipedia  

✵ 1925 – 31. March 2006
Arthur D. Hall: 18   quotes 0   likes

Famous Arthur D. Hall Quotes

“God made Homo sapiens a problem-solving creature. The trouble is that He gave us too many resources: too many languages, too many phases of life, too many levels of complexity, too many ways to solve problems, too many contexts in which to solve them, and too many values to balance.
First came the law, accounting, and history which looks backward in time for their values and decision-making criteria, but their paradigm (casuistry) cannot look forward to predict future consequences. Casuistry is overly rigid and does not account for statistical phenomena. To look forward man used two thousand years to evolve scientific method - which can predict the future when it discovers the laws of nature. In parallel, man evolved engineering, and later, systems engineering, which also anticipates future conditions. It took man to the moon, but it often did, and does, a poor job of understanding social systems, and also often ignores the secondary effects of its artifacts on the environment.
Environmental impact analysis was promoted by governments to patch over the weakness of engineering - with modest success - and it does not ignore history; but by not integrating with system design, it is also an incomplete philosophy. System design and architecture, or simply design, like science and engineering is forward-looking, and provides man with comforts and conveniences - if someone will tell them what problems to solve, and which requirements to meet. It rarely collects wisdom from the backward-looking methodologies, often overlooks ordinary operating problems in designing its artifacts, whether autos or buildings, and often ignores the principles of good teamwork.”

Source: Metasystems Methodology, (1989), p.xi cited in Philip McShane (2004) Cantower VII http://www.philipmcshane.ca/cantower7.pdf

“For any given system, the environment is the set of all objects whose behaviour is influenced by the behaviour of the primary system, and those objects whose behaviour influences the behavior of the primary system.”

Source: Definition of System, 1956, p. 20 cited in: Baleshwar Thaku eds. (2003) Perspectives in resource management in developing countries. p. 54

“For any given set of objects it is impossible to say that no interrelationships exist.”

Hall and Fagen, "Definition of System," in Walter F. Buckley (1968) Modern Systems Research, p. 82

Arthur D. Hall Quotes

“The operational sciences hoped to nourish business management, which however largely ignored them, and the latter continues to be undernourished by the business schools which are fairly broad but shallow everywhere. By over focus on short-range financial values, business management in the United States has lost a dozen major markets to the Japanese, added pollution in all its forms, and enriched itself out of all proportion to its value as just one factor of production.
Action science, developed by the social sciences over many years in relative isolation from the applied physical sciences, and which might otherwise have humanized them and made engineering more productive, was doomed to fail by being on one end of the two-culture problem wherein science and the humanities do not even speak the same language.
I could go on listing a few dozen paradigms: art, law, computer software design, medicine, politics, and architecture, each addressed to a certain context, level, or phase, each good in itself, but each limited to the fields of its origin and its purposes. The methodological problem is the same as if, in designing any large system, each subsystem designer were left to design each subsystem to the best requirements he knew. The overall requirement might not be met; overall harmony could not be achieved, and conflict could ensue to cause failure at the system level.
What is envisioned is a new synthesis, a unified, efficient, systems methodology (SM): a multiphase, multi-level, multi-paradigmatic creative problem-solving process for use by individuals, by small groups, by large multi-disciplinary teams, or by teams of teams. It satisfies human needs in seeking value truths by matching the properties of wanted systems, and their parts, to perform harmoniously with their full environments, over their entire life cycles”

Source: Metasystems Methodology, (1989), p.xi-xii, cited in Philip McShane (2004) Cantower VII http://www.philipmcshane.ca/cantower7.pdf

“For a given system, the environment is the set of all objects outside the system: (1) a change in whose attributes affect the system and (2) whose attributes are changed by the behavior of the system.”

Source: A methodology for systems engineering, 1962, p. 61 cited in: Clute, Whitehead & Reid (1967) Progressive architecture. Vol.48, Nr. 7-9. p. 106

“Every part of the system is so related to every other part that a change in a particular part causes a changes in all other parts and in the total system”

Cited in: Harold Chestnut (1967) Systems Engineering Methods. p. 121
A methodology for systems engineering, 1962

“In our definition of system we noted that all systems have interrelationships between objects and between their attributes. If every part of the system is so related to every other part that any change in one aspect results in dynamic changes in all other parts of the total system, the system is said to behave as a whole or coherently.”

At the other extreme is a set of parts that are completely unrelated: that is, a change in each part depends only on that part alone. The variation in the set is the physical sum of the variations of the parts. Such behavior is called independent or physical summativity.
Source: Definition of System, 1956, p. 23

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