For over a year, the Innovation Design Studio and CATIA Systems Engineering teams at Dassault Systèmes have shared their respective practices: Experience Design and Complex Systems Engineering. This comparison was triggered by a chance encounter and insights pointing to several shifts: the growing interconnectedness of the world, new innovation project ecosystems, growing digital capabilities, the importance of experience, and a few shared ambitions between both disciplines.
After a difficult start due to professional language differences, we did a comparison between the two practices and tested their application. We also made hypotheses and experiments on how to combine the Experience Thinking and Systems Engineering approaches in early stages of innovation, despite cultural differences. We looked at what is needed to make complexity easier to grasp, how a combined approach also calls for a fresh look at project organisations and for a practice mixing art and technology. We will open towards the questions of prototyping and testing experiences of complex systems.
