A post-positivism view of function behaviour structure

Design artefact knowledge elements and their causal relationships have been presented in previous work. Aiming to explore the existence of these elements, as well as their relationships, from a post-positivism view, this paper presents a new model of Function-Behaviour-Structure (P-FBS) by examining the related literature, and supported by collecting and analysing data based on a sample of a student’s design project. Three fundamental artefact knowledge elements, i.e., function, behaviour, and structure, and their causal relationships are re-presented in P-FBS. These elements are presented as being distributed across the three design artefact knowledge spaces, i.e., expected, working, and interpreted. However, our post-positivism perspective has highlighted a contradiction that rather than being inherent in all of these three design knowledge spaces, the function only exists in expected and interpreted design artefact knowledge space, and that the structure only exists in expected and working design artefact knowledge space. Consequently, causal relationships among function, behaviour, and structural are limited to where they exist.