We do a little example tour through many methods and ideas we are going to study in this book. This is a brief overview of the methodology that is relevant to designing swarm robot systems. We model a robot controller with a finite state machine for a collective-decision-making problem. We immediately face the typical challenge of distinguishing between microscopic information available to an individual robot and macroscopic information accessible only to an external observer. We continue with a simple macroscopic model of collective making and discuss whether it represents a self-organizing system.