Civil Engineers are among those with technical backgrounds who understand and apply systems thinking. Systems can be predictable and reproducible, or highly complex and uncertain. James Kay, a scholar of thermodynamics and complexity science at the University of Waterloo, and a professor of environmental and resource studies with cross-appointments in systems design engineering and urban planning wrote that, once we view the world through the lense of complexity science, our understanding of the world changes.
Where once we saw clockwork mechanisms, we now see self-organization and nested hierarchies characterized by evolution and emergence, attractors, rapid changes, and flips. … A complicated system can still, in principle, be predictable; a complex one is irreducibly uncertain.– Kay, J.J. (2008). So, What Changes in a Complex World?. Chpt. 5 in The Ecosystem Approach: Complexity, Uncertainty, and Managing for Sustainability (2008), Ed.s Waltner-Toews, Kay, and Lister, Columbia University Press, New York. 79.
In CIVL 202, students are introduced to the notion of systems thinking by working in groups to map infrastructure systems and sub-systems, identify bio-physical, economic, and social systems that can interact with infrastructure, and suggest how these systems can be influenced by climate change.
