What makes something a system by Deirdre Cerminaro

00:19:01 — What makes something a system

Cerminaro offers the working definition of a system in its most stripped-down form: anything where the sum is greater than the whole of its parts. Her example is the cell phone — disassemble it and the parts remain in your room, but you no longer have anything that can call, text or open Instagram. The phone-ness lives not in the components but in the configuration of the intersections between them. Systems design, she concludes, is precisely the design of those intersections.