The empty chair: Uncertain futures and systemic dichotomies

One of the outstanding characteristics of Bela H. Banathy was his deep concern for designing better systems for future generations. In plenary meetings often an empty chair reminded us of our responsibility to the coming generations in designing the systems for a world to come. Systems designers often have a problem in making basic a priori assumptions about system choices without having sufficient information. We describe so-called systemic dichotomies: design decisions that have to choose between basic conflict pairs (like immediate or delayed enactment, optimistic versus pessimistic approaches). For each class we give several examples, mostly from software engineering. In concluding we show that certain of these dichotomies also have a meaning in social systems. This paper could be a starting point for the next generation of system scientists, for a closer investigation of such dichotomic dimensions, a study of their properties and a research into the interdependence of various such dichotomies. Copyright (C) 2004 John Wiley Sons, Ltd.