From the course: Systems Thinking for Product Designers

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Illustrating and classifying functional relationships

Illustrating and classifying functional relationships

From the course: Systems Thinking for Product Designers

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Illustrating and classifying functional relationships

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- In previous videos, we spent some time looking at how to visually represent the functional relationships of a product. In a moment in time, the water bottle has been the simplest example, but how does this visual representation help us actually make the product better? How can it help us design a better water bottle? The critical and common mistake is to represent the functional intent of the product, what we want it to do rather than actually observe the functional performance of the product in real life, products don't function perfectly. A bottle could leak. In this case, the bottle is performing its function insufficiently, and it needs to be represented in the diagram. Perhaps a bottle is too hard to open. Now the cap is holding water to an excessive or harmful degree. We represent that visually as a different type of functional relationship. So let's apply this type of thinking to the handrail powered pump.…

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