Approved by Adviser

In a highly interconnected world, the design challenges faced by design professionals, engineers, and individual users are growing increasingly difficult due to multiple objectives that one must attempt to satisfy across multiple scales. Accordingly, the effectiveness and fit of a particular design solution is often dependent upon the ability to balance competing constraints for which there exists no optimal solution. In instances where user needs and relevant solutions are dynamic, why not attempt to leverage the knowledge, information, and sharp-end expertise of all of a product’s users distributed throughout the product system? In order to facilitate a better understanding of both product systems and the heterogeneous users who comprise them, this thesis looks to ideas from the diverse and growing body of complex systems research, and attempts to synthesize an understanding of complex product systems. In order to design for the complex environments in which products will be used, we must acknowledge the scale, scope, and complexity of the design problem, and then look to distributed information regarding users ’ needs, goals