Abstract
Mechanical designs are solutions to multi-faceted problems. In this regard, mechanical design is no different from most other engineering design disciplines. However, in many design disciplines such as software design and circuit design, designs can be characterized as collections of weakly-interacting functional modules, each of which implements one of the functional requirements. In these domains, good designs can often be accomplished by successively decomposing requirements until the lowest level requirements match the behavior of some preexisting design component. Direct transformation and recombination can then be used to complete the design. On the other hand, good mechanical designs are often highly-integrated, tightly-coupled collections of interacting components because the cost, size, and weight of mechanical components makes a direct application of the decompose and transform strategy impractical. In well designed mechanical devices a simple correspondence between specific functional requirements of the product and individual components in the design does not usually exist. The converse is also true, i.e., a specific component does not contribute to a single function of a product.
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Rinderle, J.R., Colburn, E.R., Hoover, S.P., Paz-Soldan, J.P., Watton, J.D. (1989). Form — Function Characteristics of Electro-Mechanical Designs. In: Newsome, S.L., Spillers, W.R., Finger, S. (eds) Design Theory ’88. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-3646-7_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-3646-7_10
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