[3] It has been reviewed many times in scientific literature[4][5][6][7][8]—including as a special column in The Journal of the Learning Sciences.

[2] This trend would bring about the "design methods movement" of the 1960s,[2] serving as the backdrop under which Simon wrote the article "Architecture of Complexity" (1962), which would later become The Sciences of the Artificial (1969).

The distinction Simon provides between the 'artificial' and the 'natural' is that artificial things are synthetic, and characterized in terms of functions, goals, and adaptation.

"[14] Moreover:Engineering, medicine, business, architecture, and painting are concerned not with the necessary but with the contingent – not with how things are but with how they might be – in short, with design.

[14] The book ultimately provides an information-processing theory of humanity's thinking processes as an operational, empirically based alternative to behaviorism.