Why Form Can't Follow Function
Design as the opposite of Description
Which language is true, and which languages are false? Which is the best one?
These are silly questions. Languages aren’t true or false, right or wrong, they’re just different. It might make sense to debate which language is best for talking about a certain subject – French for love? Inuit for snow? – but even then your choice will depend upon what aspect of those subjects you find most important or interesting.
Design philosophies often seem to miss this fact.
Frederick Taylor claimed that work and workers should be discussed solely in terms of time and motion. Le Corbusier claimed that houses are machines for living in and that the best way to discuss them is in a language that reflects this view. Henry Dreyfuss argued that the design of industrial products is best discussed in the langguage of ergonomics. More recently, it’s been fashionable to say that products are best understood in terms of experiences, that they are all about interaction, or that they are first and foremost markers of identity.
Or, to take a more general example: when you say that “form follows function”, you imply that function precedes from, and that the best way to understand and talk about products, therefore, is in the terms of the language of functions. Understanding things in certain terms entails talking about them in the accompanying language.
But just like German isn’t a better language than Chinese, just a different one, and Hindi doesn’t provide a more valuable way to speak about the world than Spanish does, simply a different one, the language of form and the language of function provide different ways to understand and discuss things – not better, more accurate or more valuable ones.
Still other perspectives are provided by mechanics, ergonomics, economics, market research, materials science, manufacturing, cultural studies, et cetera.
None of these disciplines, and none of their languages, or their perspectives, is better than another. It isn’t the case that mechanics is more accurate than market research, or that cultural studies is wrong and ergonomics right. Each discipline provides a different way of seeing things. A certain perspective. One way – not the way – to understand things, and to reason about them.
But conclusions from different disciplines often conflict when it comes to deciding the specifics of a design. Translating from Spanish to Chinese or from Hindi to English can throw up similar incompatibilities.
The trouble for design is that, instead of producing many different, sometimes incompatible ways of describing the world as it exists, the task is to do the opposite: to take many different, sometimes incompatible descriptions – ideas described in various disciplinary languages – and somehow bring them into the world as one coherent artifact.
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