Herbert Simon
Herbert Simon
Herbert Alexander Simon, a Nobel Prize laureate, was an American political scientist, economist, sociologist, psychologist, and computer scientist whose research ranged across the fields of cognitive psychology, cognitive science, computer science, public administration, economics, management, philosophy of science, sociology, and political science, unified by studies of decision-making. With almost a thousand highly cited publications, he was one of the most influential social scientists of the twentieth century. For many years he held the post of Richard King Mellon Professor at...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth15 June 1916
CountryUnited States of America
Think of the design process as involving first the generation of alternatives and then the testing of these alternatives against a whole array of requirements and restraints.
Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones.
Engineering, medicine, business, architecture and painting are concerned not with the necessary but with the contingent - not with how things are but with how they might be - in short, with design.
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.
Engineers are not the only professional designers. Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones. The intellectual activity that produces material artefacts 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.
The proper study of mankind is the science of design.
Solving a problem simply means representing it so as to make the solution transparent.
What a person cannot do he will not do, no matter how much he wants to do it. Normative economics has shown that exact solutions to the larger optimization problems of the real world are simply not within reach or sight. ... the behavior of an artificial system may be strongly influenced by the limits of its adaptive capacities.
Human beings, viewed as behaving systems, are quite simple. The apparent complexity of our behavior over time is largely a reflection of the complexity of the environment in which we find ourselves.
I started off thinking that maybe the social sciences ought to have the kinds of mathematics that the natural sciences had. That works a little bit in economics because they talk about costs, prices and quantities of goods. But it doesn't work a darn for the other social sciences; you lose most of the content when you translate them to numbers.
Behaving like a manager means having command of the whole range of management skills and applying them as they become appropriate.
Most of what we do to get people ready to act in situations of encounter consists of drilling these lists into them sufficiently deeply so that they will be evoked quickly at the time of the decision.
A complex decision is like a great river, drawing from its many tributaries the innumerable premises of which it is constituted.
Human beings, viewed as behaving systems, are quite simple. The apparent complexity of our behavior over time is largely a reflection of the complexity of the environment in which we find ourselves.