Functions are key
Richard Beasley
Interested in ‘big picture’ and connections Retired from Rolls-Royce and offering ‘Systems Advice’ to help you understand Systems Engineering and / or your problem / system of interest - see See the RBSystems website
https://youtu.be/ZzYfXbLE_6I
This video probably wins we a prize for most geeky thinking about Systems Engineering I've done - but 10 minutes to think what might I say on a 8 second video on top of Sydney Harbour bridge
Seriously - functions are key to the application of Systems Engineer. Solution neutral description of what you want system to do (not be). The system does these functions by your careful design.
You can use functional thinking to change an existing system - either adding a new function, doing a function a new way, doing a function new way and merging with another, or doing new way to enable something else. Some examples
1) Sydney Harbour Bridge - clear function of bridge (provide crossing, react loads etc.) when build. They added one 19 years ago - "entertain tourists" - which I experienced in video above. Bad requirement - provide awesome visitor experience - only validated by user experience. But obviously a lot of thought and mitigation gone into what could go wrong
2) Recent washing machine design using water tank rather than conceret block to damp vibration. makes it 1/3rd lighter for delivery, making transport costs lower and installation easier. Brilliant
3) digital scanning at dentists. My daughter needs a retainer, and rather than the "yucky tasting" (her words) mould they did a digital scan, and deisgned the retained from that. A dentist friend told me there has to be a high scan accuracy (perfromance reqt), and we discussed someone who used the scan to make the plaster model of the teeth and then made moulds for plates, retainers from that - failing to take advantage of the oportunity to merge functions the digital scan affords
4) shop tills - used to be mechanical to add up the prices, replaces by electric that just did same function. Now with bar code scanning many other functions available - stock monitoring, customer profiling / reward, data analytics on purchase patterns etc.
If you are designing something, you must think in terms of the functionality. Its basic but it seems many find it alien or imposssible