The Contact and Channel Approach (CC-A) has been developed to support the decomposition and design of technical systems. It is based on the principle that function and form emerge together during design, and therefore should be considered together in a design representation. This paper discusses the theory underlying the CC-A, and describes its formalization and implementation in a software tool. The approach is applied to model the system architecture of a humanoid robot arm considering the impact of a proposed design change. This illustrates some of the main benefits of the Contact and Channel Approach: helping designers visualize, understand and communicate the complex dependencies between function and form in a system architecture.@en

To support the development and analysis of engineering designs at the embodiment stage, designers work iteratively with representations of those designs as they consider the function and form of their constituent parts. Detailed descriptions of "what a machine does" usually include flows of forces and active principles within the technical system, and their localization within parts and across the interfaces between them. This means that a representation should assist a designer in considering form and function at the same time and at different levels of abstraction. This paper describes a design modelling approach that enables designers to break down a system architecture into its subsystems and parts, while assigning functions and flows to parts and the interfaces between them. In turn, this may reveal further requirements to fulfil functions in order to complete the design. The approach is implemented in a software tool which provides a uniform, computable language allowing the user to describe functions and flows as they are iteratively discovered, created and embodied. A database of parts allows the user to search for existing design solutions. The approach is illustrated through an example: modelling the complex mechanisms within a humanoid robot.

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The early design of mechanical systems is critical because it constrains options later in the design process. In this early stage of the design process, designers must consider customer requirements, how they are related to system functionality and how these requirements and functions are implemented in the physical interactions between components and sub-systems. This paper proposes an approach by which the Contact and Channel Model (C&CM) can be applied to support this stage of embodiment design. The proposed approach is implemented in a computer support tool and illustrated through a simple example. A number of opportunities for further work to extend and evaluate the approach are identified. We argue that our approach offers a unique way to consider the functionality of a design alongside the parts, surfaces and physical effects which embody that functionality, and provides an intuitive representation which could help designers iteratively develop and express this relationship.@en