Functional analyses

Evita is teaching quite a few days of a PDC while in Taiwan. A PDC with 27 or 29 students or something, so under pressure to perform!! Anyhow, she said the first time was a bit nerve racking, but otherwise it sounds like she has settled into it well. She is aiming, with my encouragement, not to just talk to the students each session and instead make it as interactive as possible. This gives more students the chance to learn (not everyone learns by sitting and listening!) and also for students to share what they know and learn from each other.

I have been helping Evita when I can, both before she left, and between the teaching days (3 day weekends). We have both searched the internet for function analysis of an element examples and found very few. The purpose of teaching this is that any element in a design (eg greenhouse, swale, donkey, tank) has needs, behaviours and products, and intrinsic characters. The design needs to try and match the placement of elements so that their needs are met by other elements' products so that there are mutually beneficial interconnections happening all over the place!

Here is one internet example I found for a lotus pond on one of my favourite PDC websites:

https://pin.it/w4xljgoednkn3g, but nothing else besides the ubiquitous chicken from Mollison's manual. Evita wanted some 'answers' for a selection of animals, so I thought I would share them here too: