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When the first edition of The Sciences of the Artificial was published in 1969, it was initially a source of embarrassment for booksellers and librarians: Which disciplinary heading should it be classified under? Not only did it testify to the then 53-year-old Herbert A. Simon’s range of competences in most of the areas of knowledge recognized by the academies of science, but it also argued for the gnoseological and epistemological legitimacy of these “new sciences,” namely the sciences of the artificial, engineering science, and design science, based as they are on “projects” rather than on “so-called natural objects.” The journey taken by this book through culture deserves to be told, as it is still underway fifty years after its first edition. The first phase was its genesis from 1945 to 1969: enlightened by the author’s election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1959 and to the National Academy of Sciences in 1967. The second phase was one of astonishing growth from 1969 to 1981: three more chapters were added to the second edition, and Simon won the ACM Turing Award (Computing) in 1975, followed by the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1978. The third phase, 1981-1996-2001, was marked by the publication of the epistemological manifesto Reason in Human Affairs (1983), which would contribute to the renewed paradigm of complex epistemology through the “new sciences,” that is to say the sciences of the artificial, engineering science, complex systems theory, and design science.