From Composites to Service Systems: The Role of Emergence in Service Design

Service Design is an engineering endeavor to enrich some aspect of the real world through a man-made artifact. Systems approach to modeling reality is particularly relevant to Service Design as it seeks to explain reality as a composition of functional observations. Nevertheless, its adoption varies from casual interpretations of interconnectedness to citations of non-deducible causality. To establish Systems approach firmly within the domain of Service Design, it is important to provide an unambiguous characterization of the nature of composition that a Systemic view entails. Further, such characterization should be amenable to the development of a formal framework for specifying Services. In this paper, we take a cognitive approach to composition and highlight the difference between composites as structure-unifying integrated-wholes and composites as emergence-revealing systems. We then translate this characterization into a set of visual semantics for expressing a service-oriented view of observed reality.