All things are connected

Design of complex system is essentially about connections: Connection of concepts, connection of objects, connection of teams. And products of the future will be connected seamlessly across physical and virtual domains. Connections can produce systems that offer more than the sum of the components but they can also yield to systems that are less powerful than the sum of the components or that are so compromised by their interactions that they do not work at all. Collaboration is the name of the game for design, for production, for operation of multi-scale systems. There is increasingly less distance between design and operation of systems. An efficient management of interactions among deployed parts of a larger system requires principles that are common to the design methods developed at the bleeding edge of technology. I will examine the evolution of design principles and of multiscale systems and the challenges we are facing today. I will point to a number of exciting fields where advances are constantly made towards the mastering of connections.