Book excerpt: Without standardized construction elements such as nuts, bolts, bearings, beams, resistors and the like, the design of physical equipment is hopelessly inefficient, and engineers are continually bogged down with re-designing these elements over and over again. Emphasizing a top-down approach, this volume considers the purpose and basic features of design and how the concept of value can provide a quantitative measure of that wider interaction of the engineered object with its environment. This work also develops the domain in which functional design takes place and explores how the system concept can be embedded in that domain. It proposes a number of functional design elements and develops them in considerable detail, outlining how they can be applied as part of a coherent design framework. For greater understanding of the discussed concepts, numerous examples and analogies are included.