Design of social systems: The case of a unique course

Almost every engineer deals with systems, but not all the systems are the same - there are several levels, of which the highest is the social system. The engineer who designs such a system has to take into account a variety of objectives, often contradictory, as constraints on the very ends that the design tries to accomplish. Social systems are the turf of industrial engineering, but its curriculum does not reflect this fact. The prevalent design knowledge is more about technological systems, so even the little design training that industrial engineers receive is not the one they need. This paper is about a course that aims at fixing both deficiencies by directly addressing the very weaknesses. The course, provided in the junior year, applies the PBL (problem/project based learning) style. Our lessons after eight semesters are that the industrial engineering curriculum must put much more emphasis on underdeveloped competencies such as system thinking, qualitative approach and research methods, open-ended problems solving and ambiguity tolerance. Unfortunately, most of these skills are suppressed in the current curriculum.