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The principal focus of this book is on how games foster human playing, learning, and competing, including how we can design games to do this better. The author provides a wealth of real-world examples of how he created games for clients in the domains of education, energy, healthcare, national security, and transportation.

A human-centered society creatively balances investments in sources of innovation, while also governing in a manner that eventually limits exploitation by originators once innovations have proven their value in the marketplace, broadly defined to include both private and public constituencies. The desired balance requires society to invest in constituencies to be able to create innovations that provide current and future collective benefits, while also assuring society provides laws, courts, police, and military to protect individual rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The balance addresses collectivism vs. individualism. Collectivism emphasizes the importance of the community. Individualism, in contrast, is focused on the rights and concerns of each person. Unity and selflessness or altruism are valued traits in collectivist cultures; independence and personal identity are central in individualistic cultures. Collectivists can become so focused on collective benefits that they ignore sources and opportunities for innovation. Individualists can tend to invest themselves, almost irrationally, in ideas and visions, many of which will fail, but some will transform society. Collectivists need to let individualists exploit their successful ideas. Individualists need to eventually accept the need to provide collective benefits. This book addresses the inherent tension underlying the pursuit of this balance. It has played a central role in society at least since the Industrial Revolution (1760-1840). Thus, the story of this tension, how it regularly emerges, and how it is repeatedly resolved, for better or worse, is almost a couple of centuries old. Creating a human-centered society can be enabled by creatively enabling this balance. Explicitly recognizing the need for this balance is a key success factor. This book draws upon extensive experiences within the domains of transportation and defense, computing and communications, the Internet and social media, health and wellness, and energy and climate. Balancing innovation and exploitation takes varying forms in these different domains. Nevertheless, the underlying patterns and practices are sufficiently similar to enable important generalizations.

This book comprises a set of stories about being an engineer for many decades and the lessons the author learned from research and practice. These lessons focus on people and organizations, often enabled by technology.

Public-private collaborations are key to the functioning of most essential ecosystems such as security, healthcare, education, and energy. William B. Rouse addresses the challenges of transforming these ecosystems and provides an integrated perspective for understanding and enabling change.

Computer-based simulation has long been used to project the behavior of systems too complex for analytical calculation. Simulation has also been used for many decades to enable human visualization and learning about complex tasks such as aircraft piloting and process plant control, and the versatility and cost-effectiveness of these training simulators are widely recognized

AbstractThe complexity of health cannot be adequately explained with a representation that only captures one level of abstraction of the ecosystem. Multiple levels of abstraction are needed to comprehend the full range of forces that affect the health of a population. These levels are outlined and run the gamut from cells to society, ranging from aberrations of immune system signalling to society's values and norms. Computational modelling of this multilevel system can enable both understanding and managing the complexity of health. This is illustrated in contexts that include Washington, DC, and New York City.

AbstractThis article considers the national challenge of controlling healthcare costs. It is argued that this system‐level challenge is better addressed with an engineering approach rather than from the perspective of medical science that, quite rightly, is tailored to address clinical practice. The engineering approach is outlined and three models are proposed for controlling the costs of healthcare so that the growth of these costs tracks the growth of gross domestic product. These models provide insights into the magnitude of efficiency gains needed to accomplish this goal. Possible ways to achieve these gains are discussed. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.