Men and Their Technical Systems

With the concept of a technical system the whole TRIZ theory corpus revolves around a term that is not very precisely defined in the TRIZ literature, but left to a “common sense”. In this paper an attempt is made to determine how far a notion of technical system takes in this theoretical context and how it can be related to approaches from neighboring theory corpuses. It turns out that focusing on an artifact dimension of technology, as defined by the term technical system, blocks the view on essential relational phenomena that are inherent to a world of technical systems and a notion of technical principle is more suited for the analysis of such relational phenomena.