Tuesday, 10 November 2009

User Defined Effects generating Creativity


Southbeach provides 'user defined' effects. These are different from effect labels.  On any Southbreach effect - e.g. produces - you can add a label to clarify or 'subtype' the effect. For example, you could label a produces effect as 'increases', or a destroys effect as 'degrades'. A user defined effect, by contrast, is a new effect ... something you feel does not exist in the standard Southbeach vocabulary and synonym tree. Moreover, it can generate unique 'creativity'.

Which of the user defined effects in the model below are NOT synonyms of Southbeach Notation 0.9 effects? Adds is contributes. Provides is produces ... but what about fulfills? Is that 'uses' or 'implements'? The only effect in the model (left) that is REALLY a new effect, is 'contains'. Containment, like other 'functional' modeling effects, is not provided in standard Southbeach notation. The reason is ... there are so many of them. The world is full of functional relationship, and less full of 'influence' relationships.

User defined effects, therefore, are very useful at adding 'functional' modeling to Southbeach. This capability, linked to MyCreativity rules, can be very powerful.

Since a MyCreativity rule can reference the label of any effect, it is possible to write rules that apply to functional models. For example:

@contains(, harmful) "Can we remove {to} from {from}? since it is harmful. Can we replace {to} with something else?"

Another example for this model might be:

@limits(, potential) "What do we need to do to maximise {to}?"

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