I attended Harold Nelson’s systems thinking and design action class today. Nelson talked about the basics of systems design and how systemics is all about relationships, interrelationships, and emergence. Emergence can be explained by the wisdom that whole is bigger than its sum. In design, we name emergence and emergent qualities as the composition and compositional qualities. The entire class Nelson tried to explore the topical pairs of part and wholes, descriptions and explanations. Here is an introductory video from Russell Ackoff, one of the pioneers of systems thinking. This one is followed by two consecutive videos.