  Why was the $6 billion FAA air traffic control project scrapped? How could
the 1977 New York City blackout occur? Why do large scale engineering systems
or technology projects fail? How do engineering changes and errors propagate,
and how is that related to epidemics and earthquakes? In this paper we
demonstrate how the rapidly expanding science of complex design networks could
provide answers to these intriguing questions. We review key concepts, focusing
on non-trivial topological features that often occur in real-world large-scale
product design and development networks; and the remarkable interplay between
these structural features and the dynamics of design rework and errors, network
robustness and resilience, and design leverage via effective resource
allocation. We anticipate that the empirical and theoretical insights gained by
modeling real-world large-scale product design and development systems as
self-organizing complex networks will turn out to be the standard framework of
a genuine science of design.
