Based on the article 'African investment could be hit'
Interestingly, whilst drawing this model, the use of Southbeach clarified several points that were not explicitly stated in the article.

Assessing Conflicting Design Requirements (Car Example)

This Southbeach Model shows one of the key principles from TRIZ, namely that everything is both useful and harmful, and its just a matter of perspective as to whether something is considered to be predomantly useful or harmful.

Consider the Car, useful, as it provides Travel; however, it consumes fuel and creates pollution, which counteracts the Environment. People still drive cars despite this, hence the car is considered predominantly useful despite its harmful side effects. Furthermore, "The need for speed", or the need to accelerate to higher speeds more quickly, results in many cars also having turbo chargers. These typically are designed to improve performance and this is often at the cost of creating even more pollution.

Southbeach can be used to understand root causes and perform impact analysis. Also, it is useful for functional decomposition of systems. Consider the following extension to the above diagram:

Here we have extrapolated that pollution contributes to Global Warming, which in turn is actually destroying the Environment, and in a much stronger way than pollution alone. The model recognises that there are also other factors contributing to Global Warming, and that these may be worth exploring. What you explore depends on who you are and what you are trying to do. An environmentalist may explore this avenue. A car manufacturer may explore the pollution avenue in more detail. There are examples of car manufacturers who have taken that extra step and recognised that the car could potentially clean the environment - having an overall positive effect. There are actually cars that clean the air now.

This model additionally shows how further design considerations result in systems becoming more complex over time. Here the need to improve cost effectiveness and reduce pollution has resulted in this car being upgraded to include an economy mode (or "green" mode). This reduces the fuel consumption. However, for comfort this car has also been upgraded to include air conditioning to improve comfort, a desirable feature of the car. This counteracts the economy, hence increasing the fuel consumption and increasing the pollution.

The system is now considerably more complex, and as a consequence contains many more tensions as parts of the system are working in opposition to each other. This results in another iteration of the design process, where further parts are added to compensate for the conflicting effects of the existing parts. The result will be an even more complex system, but by design, this will reduce waste by resolving some of these technical contradictions between the components. There are other ways to improve systems, and some designers are exploring how instead of adding more and more parts (increasing the weight, incidentally, and thereby increasing fuel consumption further), they are looking for ways of improving component design and simplifying the overall design to increase the harmony of the system. This involves taking a holistic approach to the design goals. We will talk more about this in future.


A further elaboration of this model might observe that Car's only produce polution when they are travelling - and it is actually the act of consuming fuel that is the primary cause of that pollution. This model below shows the pollution being created by the act of fuel consumption, and breaks that pollution down into different types using the 'is-a' construct. This elaborated model also includes blue boxes indicating the actions that could be considered to improve the situation.

President Obama

This Southbeach model shows some of the situation surrounding the recent historic rise of Barack Obama to the Presidency of the United States of America. Obama is a Democrat, McCain a Republican. Democrats and Republicans are in opposition. So, naturally, are Obama and McCain. Their opposition is greatly intensified, however, by their deeply opposing approaches to achieving the massive change demanded of the situation in the US, and the rising concerns of the people. This election campaign started out with the idea that "it's about the war"; the five and a half year war in Iraq being a hotly debated topic around the world. After time, the idea changed; the credit crunch has had significant global impact. The war has also had significant economic impact in the US. Soon people were saying "it's about the economy".

Obama and McCain had deeply opposing approaches in both these areas, Obama being against the war in Iraq, and promising to shift the tax burden towards the wealthy. Whereas McCain supported the war in Iraq and pledged to maintain the tax cuts in place under Bush for those earning over $250,000.

As well as these core electoral themes, Obama was a Civil Liberty and Rights activist and litigator whereas McCain had expressed concerns regarding affirmative action. The respective goals of these two men, whilst not being clearly useful or harmful from any general perspective - and hence divided the nation to create one of the biggest races in history, were clearly in opposition, representing fundamentally different approaches to how to achieve the Massive Change demanded of the American people.

All these factors, along with the fact that Obama was the first black candidate for President of the United States, resulted in a record turnout with over 135 million voters, including many who had never voted before.

Whilst the full confluence of influencing factors that created this reality cannot be fully expressed, debate and postulation as to the reasons for the success of Obama have and will continue to rage. One piece of research showed that there was actually a correlation between the DOW index and the McCain poll. As the DOW rose, so too did the McCain poll. When it fell, so did McCain's popularity. This was brought to a very public and critical head for McCain when, on the same day as he claimed "the economy is strong", Lehman Brothers went bust, dealing a severe blow to his credibility.

Ironically, the stock market experienced its biggest election day rally in 24 years on expectation of an Obama victory as the Dow Jones industrial averages surged 300 points, or 3%, to close at 9,625.28 points. The US TV networks, just after 11.00pm (ET:4.00 GMT), declared that Obama had won. Obama was now President of the United States.

The result of the election is clear. Now we just have to wait for results from the policies.