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The Contact and Channel Approach (C&C-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 C&C-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.

The choice of product architecture can affect many factors, from the technical performance of a product to the design effort required, production costs, and satisfaction of lifecycle requirements. This paper explores how computational tools can augment creative methods in product architecture design. It describes a method for synthesising product architectures in the form of networks of components. The set of architectures for a product is specified using constraints on the structure of the network. The method has been implemented as a software tool, and an example illustrates how this might be used in practice. Discussion of the example highlights some of the issues which arise through using the method, particularly those of constructing an appropriate set of constraints, and of identifying promising architectures from the large set of synthesis results. Further work will address these issues and evaluate the approach in practice, to compare the cost-benefit ratio with more conventional methods for architecture design (e.g. brainstorming).

Graph structures are fundamental in many aspects of design. This paper discusses a way to improve access to design spaces of graph structures, by converting graph structures into numerical values and vice versa. Mathematical properties of such conversions are described, and those that are desirable are identified. A candidate conversion algorithm, Indexed Stacked Blocks, is proposed. Its use and benefits are illustrated through an example graph-structure design problem. The example demonstrates that such conversions allow design spaces of graph structures to be visualized, sampled, and evaluated. In principle, they also allow other powerful numerical techniques to be applied to the design of graph-structure-based systems.