Defining conceptual artefacts to manage and design simplicities in complex adaptive systems

Abstract

The concept of Simplexity has emerged several times in many discourses within different scientific domains: it somehow refers to the intertwined nature of Simplicity and Complexity. To the eye of the scientist beholder, any of these contributions renders different facets. None of those is negligible nor seems to be superior. Starting from this consideration, this paper uses a recent Design Science Research based method to develop a conceptual artefact allowing the entire realm of Complexity Sciences to unravel the Complexity of Simplexity. By moving through an in-depth systematic literature review, this research mined the nuances of Simplexity's meaning from several different research domains throughout seventy years, and then distilled those nuances. The resulting conceptual artefacts are possibly useful any time there is the need for dealing with Complexity – from the design of cyber-socio-technical systems to the analysis of protein networks – paving the way for a shared language for Psychologists, Neuro-linguists, Designers, Resilience Engineers, Biologists, and other Complexity Scientists.

Keywords

• DSR
• Grounded theory
• CAS
• Simplexity
• Socio-technical systems