⚙️ TRIZ notes: the law of regression

 Working on his theory of inventions Genrich Altshuller invented/discovered so called Laws of technical systems evolution which further were developed by other contributors. Looking at those laws we can see that all of them are in some sense “positive” — i.e. implicitly assume that technical systems always develop from “worse” to “better” only. BUT from my experience I can conclude that the things are not so simple.

For example: in 2000ths I used several button-based “stupidphones”. They could do almost nothing except the very basic functions a phone in general is necessary for. And of course it was very unsatisfactory. But when I changed to use “smartphones” I soon was faced with very disappointing obstacle: when I set an alarm on a “stupidphone” and it happens that the device is low on power it still is able to awake next day to activate the alarm and perform ringing even if it turned off due to a complete discharge of the battery before. Very helpful feature. And no modern device I was dealing with can do the same because of their multi-level structure.

There were also many similar cases with software in my life. So it seems it can be formulated a law of regression which states that

Evolution of technical systems is always associated with a regression (degradation) of some function together with improvements of other functions.

• it looks like classical technical contradiction concept for solving which the TRIZ itself was developed, but there is a slight difference: that is that TRIZ strives to resolve contradictions but the ‘law’ states that the contradictions are inevitably born by the development of technical system.

That was a pessimistic part) — now it is the time for optimistic: seems that the law can be taken into a service for detection of potential drawbacks introduced during improvement of any system.

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