The topic of complicated vs complex is not new. I can not remember which blog I picked it up from, but googling will get you a plethora of pages. I thought I’d redraw the picture.
+---------------------------------------+| Problem || ^ || | . ||Complex | D . C || | . || |.................. || | . ||Simple | A . B || | . || +------------------> Solution || Simple Complicated |+---------------------------------------+
So there are four regimes:
- A: Simple solutions for simple problems. This is run of the mill engineering, known techniques, working out the solutions. Let’s call it manufacturing.
- B: Sometimes, however, you will have people that will want to appear intelligent, and they will overdesign a solution, making it complicated in the process. This is the worst quadrant to be in, though some people who prefer to appear smart will and thus see it otherwise. I’ll call it consultancy (or if you want, marketing).
- C: This is the standard regime for problems that are complex and that have not been solved before. They are big and tough to solve, and initially one can imagine that complicated solutions will arise. This is what engineering is all about.
- D: However, ideally, one would find a simple solution to a complex problem. And this, although it is the hardest of all, this is what I believe science should be about.
Just a thought 
Edit: I had a brief conversation about this with a colleague. And just because I call C engineering does not mean it’s not research. Obviously it can be research, just that it would be engineering research and not science research (in the computer science sense, for instance).
