Research on self-organization tries to describe and explain forms, complex patterns and behaviours that arise from a collection of entities without an external organizer. As researchers in artificial systems, our aim is not to mimic self-organizing phenomena arising in Nature, but to understand and to control underlying mechanisms allowing desired emergence of forms, complex patterns and behaviours. In this paper we analyze three forms of self-organization: stigmergy, reinforcement mechanisms and cooperation. For each forms of self-organisation, we present a case study to show how we transposed it to some artificial systems and then analyse the strengths and weaknesses of such an approach.