ABSTRACT: "Effective system design suffers from many detractions. A systematic study has been made of the kinds of detractions that are at work in system design. These have been classified into five types: Individual, organizational/managerial, academic, professional, and social. Within each type a variety of detractions are found. Since most design activity involves more than one of these types, and since each type involves a variety of detractions, one can conclude that the probability of bad design is very high due to the large number of potential detractions. The nature of these detractions and their cumulative effect on design will be discussed in detail. In a companion paper, means for overcoming these detractions will be discussed." This is the first in a sequence of two papers presented as companion pieces at the conference in St. Louis. The paper was written in 1987, but presented in the SGSR meeting the following spring. The SGSR did not publish a proceedings volume in 1988, so this paper was not published. [The companion paper is titled Oversight and Steering for Effective System Design] Warfield's comments on this paper, written in his 1987 manuscript "Integrative Sciences... DETRACTORS TO EFFECTIVE SYSTEMS DESIGN - "One of two papers to be read as companion pieces. This article classifies problems affecting system design into five different types: Individual, organizational/managerial, academic, professional and social. Varying attributes of each type of problem are discussed."

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