Products are functions

A good way to think about products (and services?) is to consider them as functions. from input situation to an output situation.

$y = f(x)$

The designer’s task is to create a new $f$ given $x$ and $y$. (In this way, designing is like machine learning, which too tries to estimate $f$ from data.) This framing makes the value explicit as the difference between the current and new output situations.

Crucially, inputs and outputs are the requirements for the function. The requirements should not be set for $f$, but independent of it, as tests for fitness1.

  1. The phrasing echoes Christopher Alexander (Ryan Singer on Christopher Alexander) context, and fit. ↩

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