Good mechanical designs are often composed of highly- integrated, tightly-coupled components where the interactions among the components are essential to the function and economic execution of the design. This assertion runs counter to design methodologies in other engineering fields, such as software design and circuit design, that advocate designs in which each component fulfills a single function with minimal interaction. Because of the geometry, weight, and cost of mechanical components, converting a single functional requirement into a single component is often both impractical and infeasible. Each component may contribute to the performance of more than one function, and the performance of each function may be distributed over many components. In fact, most mechanical components perform not only the desired function, but also many additional, unintended functions. In good mechanical designs, these additional functions often are exploited. A formal methodology for mechanical design for transforming the system functional requirements into a description of a realizable physical system is proposed. It is the hypothesis that, by creating a formal description of the function of a limited set of mechanical designs and a corresponding description of physical components, a description of a physical system that takes advantage of the multiple functions of its components can be generated.
