The Sciences of the Artificial

Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones. The intellectual activity that produces material artifacts is no different fundamentally from the one that prescribes remedies for a sick patient or the one that devises a new sales plan for a company or a social welfare policy for a state. Des

An artifact can be thought of as a meeting point—an “interface” in today’s terms—between an “inner” environment, the substance and organization of the artifact itself, and an “outer” environment, the surroundings in which it operates. If the inner environment is appropriate to the outer environment, or vice versa, the artifact will serve its intend

Natural science impinges on an artifact through two of the three terms of the relation that characterizes it: the structure of the artifact itself and the environment in which it performs.

The engineer, and more generally the designer, is concerned with how things ought to be—how they ought to be in order to attain goals, and to function.

The thesis is that certain phenomena are “artificial” in a very specific sense: they are as they are only because of a system’s being molded, by goals or purposes, to the environment in which it lives. If natural phenomena have an air of “necessity” about them in their subservience to natural law, artificial phenomena have an air of “contingency” i

For the question before us, the difference between local and global maxima is crucial. In the landscape of California every tiny hill is a local maximum of altitude, but only Mt. Whitney is a global maximum. For many purposes it makes a difference whether one finds oneself standing on Nob Hill or Mt. Whitney. Finding a local maximum is usually easy

It is quite easy to devise systems in which each subsystem is optimally adapted to the other subsystems around it, but in which the

Aspiration levels provide a computational mechanism for satisficing. An alternative satisfices if it meets aspirations along all dimensions. If no such alternative is found, search is undertaken for new alternatives. Meanwhile, aspirations along one or more dimensions drift down gradually until a satisfactory new alternative is found or some existi

In simple cases uncertainty arising from exogenous events can be handled by estimating the probabilities of these events, as insurance companies do—but usually at a cost in computational complexity and information gathering. An alternative is to use feedback to correct for unexpected or incorrectly predicted events. Even if events are imperfectly a