Systems and Forms

Forms

There is a philosophical school of thought known as idealism, the biggest proponent being Plato, this school of thought says there exists fundamental forms in an ideal world and that the physical world is just a projection of these pure forms. With this in mind, a system can be considered as the combination of any number of these forms to accomplish a specific end. This concept that a system is just a combination of basic forms that known patterns can be used to solve the design problems is not new at all. For example, in the software community the idea of developing software systems with "architectural patterns" assumes that there are basic structures underpinning a problem and the use of architectural patterns one can build the system using proven approaches.The civil architecture world has similar concepts where the rise of "pattern and form" languages help guide the architect to design buildings since there are commonalities between design challenges that span different building projects. In the systems engineering world, the notion of system patterns can be seen where the principles of a command and control center for a military operations align very much with building of a control room for a manufacturing plant. The basic thrust of my argument is that these forms are manifesting themselves in different domains and depending on the domain some patterns are more primal than others. It is the role of the architect to understand what forms are most relevant, and how the design impacts the synthesis of these forms to deliver the end system. 

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Examples

Below are some system forms that exist, I do not consider these to be exhaustive but they are a good sampling,  

Systems Architecting