For the UK to maintain a position near the top of the value chain in the new global economy, we shall need to apply leading edge skills and knowledge to the development and design of complex integrated systems; services and processes as well as products. Our economy can no longer flourish by competing against developing economies in the Far East, Eastern Europe and elsewhere for the manufacture of mass produced consumer goods. All of those economies also aspire to rise up the value chain by developing and designing more complex integrated system based products and services. That is where we can and must still be competitive.

To produce the designers and developers of these higher added value integrated systems, our education system needs to produce many more graduates with the awareness, knowledge and skills required to work on the design and building of systems as opposed to components. ‘System Engineering’ has long been regarded as a highly specialised occupation, whose practitioners piece together complex integrated systems from stand-alone components and sub-systems. The role of the systems engineer has often been that of a “meta specialist” working with a wide range of other (mainly single discipline) specialists, who had little knowledge of (and sometimes little interest in) the totality of the project they were contributing to!

We need to move quickly to a position where all engineering graduates are comfortable working as part of an integrated system team, rather than as isolated specialists working within a tightly defined box. This does not imply that they will be “dumbed down” to become low level generalists, but that they will be far more able to make a specialist contribution to a complex system design by understanding better what the system, as opposed to the component, is intended to deliver.

Some universities already deliver specialist systems engineering courses, mainly at post graduate level. Many of these have been developed in conjunction with employers keen to increase their capabilities in integrated system design. As well as these specialist courses, which only produce a limited number of graduates, there is a very clear need for a vastly larger cadre of “system literate” engineers from all of the major engineering disciplines. In 2004, The Royal Academy of Engineering started a scheme (Visiting Professors in Integrated System Design) to bring the practical experience of integrated system designers into academia, to help to develop the teaching methods and materials to improve the system awareness of all graduate engineers.

This is the third strand of Visiting Professor Schemes, following on from Principles of Engineering Design in 1989 and Engineering Design for Sustainable Development in 1998 www.raeng.org.uk/education/vps/default.htm It quickly became apparent that there was no universal understanding of how best to develop this system awareness. Consequently the Academy put together a small study group to develop a short treatise on the principles of Integrated System Design to act as a guide to educators, students and indeed practising engineers. This event marks the launch of that treatise, entitled ‘Creating Systems that Work’ and will show how important it is for UK industry to beef up its integrated systems design capabilities and how the academic community can respond to the need.

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