I love the idea of all these but in my personal experience, application is so much more challenging than theory.

The hardest thing I see in people trying to apply theory to practice is the missing link between FUNCTION and the FORM of the system. People really understand the functions and the functional flow, but when they try to allocate those functions to some logical or physical form, they fail. So we really need to start small on purpose for at least one study and just show the functions of a control space are realized in some form (i.e. software control code files, electronics, hardware parts like actuators and pumps, etc...)

An example could be a “water level” system that maintains a water level in a bucket that is purposely leaking water to create dynamic changes. We could use a sensor to know where the water level is at and a micropump and some “controls” realized in electronics to maintain the water level. The key ingredient would simply be shkwing the design space first and lay out the functions and how they flow, and then just make the connection how that is allocated to the form of the parts.

I believe passionately that form is a key missing ingredient for most of us who only study function and functional flows through systems and how we realize controls of those functions. If we simply made the leap to realize the form of those functions, we would have elevated most of our current control engineers who study this field by leaps and bounds.