System thinking is essential to ensure a proper embedding of a system in its societal or industrial context. This course guides students in executing a model-based design process of a manufacturing system, going through requirements, architecting, design and validation phases. The course introduces the key systems engineering concepts, covering among others design processes such as the waterfall, V, spiral, and NASA models. The systems design notation SysML is introduced as a basis for documenting the design process. Performance modeling techniques are introduced to support model-based exploration of cost-performance trade-offs in the system design.