Stage 3 Identify available resources, constraints, and requirements

3 Stage 3 Identify available resources, constraints, and requirements 

The category of substance resources includes all kinds of available materials. In our example of a floor structural system, we have such materials available as steel, concrete, wood, paint, glass, and so on. 

The concept of field resources is less familiar, but it may be the key to our inventive problems. By field resources we mean all kinds of fields that can be utilized in our project. For example, in our floor structural system, we could use a stress field, that is, we could use stresses to create a prestressed concrete or even rarely used but feasible prestressed steel structures. Also, we could use an electromagnetic field to transport the structural system to its location in the building or even to keep it in its desired position. We will have also such fields available as the temperature field or the gravity field, which both are easily available and eventually could be used. 

Time resources represent our understanding of the time factor in our designing situation. This kind of resource not only includes times when our team members are available and when experts are available but also information about the timing of the construction and manufacturing of the individual structural members. It may also contain information on how much time is available for our project. Space resources provide information about available space for our system, access to it from various directions, penalties for using more space than originally assigned, and so on. 

In this case, we begin the process with the identification of one of the known structural systems, which are commercially available and could be used in our design case. Let us assume that in our case the reference system is in the form of trusses supporting a steel deck with concrete on the top of it. Such a system was used in the World Trade Center, but it is also widely used in industrial buildings because of its relatively low cost, simplicity, constructability, and rigidity. 

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