There’s a lot of goodness in this article on designing ‘programmes’ or systems, so I won’t try to extract a single part. It’s very relevant to the final stage of a Masters programme too: The kind of work that results in “new knowledge” often results also in some kind of system. It’s the difference between a single solution to a known problem, and a set of design rules or principles that can be reapplied to future, unknown, problems.