Individual, reductionist vs. whole systems design method and results, from RMI:
Also, "Designers tend to disassemble design problems into their individual pieces. This reductionism, common in Western science, can be useful for developing topical expertise, but optimizing individual parts with little thought to their interactions yields inferior results. As Amory Lovins wrote in Natural Capitalism (1999), “Designing a window without the building, a light without the room, or a motor without the machine it drives works as badly as designing a pelican without the fish. Optimizing components in isolation tends to pessimize the whole system—and hence the bottom line. You can actually make a system less efficient while making each of its parts more efficient, simply by not properly linking up those components. If they’re not designed to work with one another, they’ll tend to work against one another.”