Requirements Engineering [26, 27] is an old discipline which has been conveniently subject to being overlooked by system designers. Most requirements analysis writings either advise general guidelines which are short of any concrete operational aspects, or they are not simply at the scale of complex open systems construction. This paper presents a new analytical framework and a method which considers an end-to-end view of a system, and is specifically designed to support the requirements analysis and design of open systems. The paper briefly discusses the conceptual shortcomings in this area, presents an analytical perspective for requirements engineering, and proposes a new framework called "Abstraction-oriented Frames". This framework is a hybrid model consisting of three major parts offering a specific operational approach based on a consistent end-to-end analytical view of the system.