Our Philosophy

The primary discipline of our practice is “an interdisciplinary approach and means for enabling the realization and deployment of successful systems”  (otherwise known as systems engineering), supported by a core dedication to quality defined in a very fundamental sense. We subscribe to no specific quality system, since we believe that they can all be derived from W. Edwards Deming's 14 points so we might as well simply start from there. The core principle that drives our approach to systems engineering is usability.

To us, usability means that every design or engineering project must begin and end with the user. “Concern for the man himself and his fate must always form the chief interest of all technical endeavors.” This pronouncement by Albert Einstein elegantly states what we consider the obvious, and what we consider the driver of our business. Whether the project is a bridge or a school website, a hospital or a program for customer relationship management, it is the designer’s or engineer’s task to ensure that the end result “shall be a blessing and not a curse to mankind.” Too many designers, engineers, developers, builders — creators of any kind — begin and end with an idea in their own heads. They rarely go back after a year, two years, five years to see if the “creations of their minds” are being used as they thought they would be, if they are in the users’ eyes a blessing or if users are daily cursing them.

What we are talking about, of course, is the integration of usability engineering into every other kind of creative discipline, otherwise stated as a systems engineering approach to every project. We don’t kid ourselves that everyone understands the need for this as clearly as we do. When we first broach the subject with colleagues or potential teaming partners, their response nine times out of ten is “Our customer would never pay for that!” It is precisely our belief that the customer, in the end, pays dearly for not doing it that drives us to keep promoting the need for usability engineering to be integrated into every project.

Holism — very simply, the heir to Aristotle’s statement that “the complete is more than the sum of its pieces” — is another key driver in our emphasis on systems thinking and our focus on a conceptual approach. The science of complexity (complexity theory) can be seen as the scientific formulation of holism, while its close cousin chaos theory is the ultimate scientific formulation of the construction manager’s working rule of thumb that for every dollar you skimp in initial construction, you will pay ten in maintenance and repair, and you will assume a cost of $100 from inefficiencies in the use of the building. The two principles of usability and holism share some simple axioms that we believe are fundamental to understanding systems: systems are non-linear and dynamic, but not random; the linkages and interactions between the elements that comprise the whole system are as determinant of its behavior as the individual components; and systems demonstrate sensitive dependence on initial conditions, that is small variations in initial conditions can produce large variations in the long term behavior of the system. To be able to incorporate these principles in our practice, we also borrow from the techniques of complexity and chaos science the use of models and simulations to illustrate the conceptual design in a way that is accessible to all designers and users.

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