Model Instantiations

In three specific model instantiations, this chapter demonstrates how URANOS can be applied to other research domains. The first instantiation, referred to as the body-mind continuum, addresses humans as holistic and spiritual beings embedded in their natural, informational and socio-cultural environments. The second instantiation provides a framework for integral thinking and designing based on the AQAL-model from K. Wilber (2007). The third instantiation addresses holistic and cognitive coordination processes in the context of multi-agent and cyber-physical systems. These three instantiations together build the core of our human-centered modeling approach. Each of them holds our generic system model at its core, but at the same time has its own specific extensions.

Towards Human-Centered System Design

Based on URANOS and its instantiations for human beings, integral thinking and coordination, this chapter presents a model for human-machine collaboration. Nine design principles are presented. They ensure that designing and operating human-centered systems respects human integrity in any human-machine collaboration, i.e. not harmed, or enslaved, reduced, etc. A central component of this model is the conversation between human and machine. It allows humans and machines to enter into an adaptive learning organization, a prerequisite for any mutual beneficial collaboration. Finally, a concrete use case addressing smart industrial machines operating in the context of the fourth industrial revolution is presented.

URANOS

This chapter presents a generic system model called URANOS, that allows to design complex human-centered systems. It is not aligned to any particular discipline. Rather, it helps to build integral systems in different domains of science and engineering, even though it was originally intended to participate in the design of complex human-centered systems in the framework of ICT. URANOS aims at encouraging interdisciplinary work and reinforces the understanding of complex systems in general. It combines different epistemological standpoints and their corresponding realities into a wholeness. Concretely, the three fundamental standpoints of objectivism, subjectivism and holism are used to holistically handle all relevant entities such as humans, animals, machines and environments. This chapter also addresses systemic features like consciousness, collaboration and symbiosis providing a generic and abstract understanding of them.

Generic System Models

Systemic and holistic approaches provide a new way of thinking about, understanding and designing systems. In this chapter we aim to highlight the most significant and influential work in this trend, and in particular the achievements of cybernetics, systemics and coordination modeling. Starting with cybernetics, related topics like cybernetic orders, self-organization, autopoiesis and conversation theory are explained. Systemics, and especially general system theory, provide a general language and terminology to express and model systems independent of any research domain. Together with integral and system thinking, this leads to a paradigm shift in understanding and modeling complex and non-linear systems. Concretely, we introduce the meta model of Schwarz which was the starting point of our own generic system model URANOS. Finally, the coordination theories and models which had a great impact on our research on human-centered design are outlined.