Function, Functionality, Functionalism
The requirements of economy
Useless work on useful things
The minimum condition
Form eschews function
Feeble and ugly
Functionalism can be a kind of religion
Each element performs many functions
The informing idea of functionalism
Same name in the same basket
The plan must anticipate all that is needed
The element becomes a sign
Classical absurdity
205. Structure Follows Social Spaces
Roaming and capricious
What are those borders made of?
Presentable
A strangely negative character
Sine qua non
The contribution that something in them yet compelled them to make
Something more is required
Mechanisms and organisms
The center of the way
The Evolution of Useful Things
The usages of life
Form follows function
Against form follows function
UI and Capability
Embracing design constraints
An Article by Adrian RoselliConstraints have been shown to generally improve innovation. Giving targets and parameters helps ensure a team is working in unison. Identifying what is out of bounds can further focus that team.
A Plea for Lean Software
An Essay by Niklaus WirthSoftware's girth has surpassed its functionality, largely because hardware advances make this possible. The way to streamline software lies in disciplined methodologies and a return to the essentials.
Beauty in flight
A QuoteAll of us had been trained by Kelly Johnson and believed fanatically in his insistence that an airplane that looked beautiful would fly the same way.
— Ben Rich, Skunk Works
A Reflection of the Truth
The need to record
With collecting comes the need to record. A specimen without a label is simply a (sometimes) pretty object. Without its associated data it is scientifically worthless.
Mental infrastructure
The diary provides the mental infrastructure that stimulates the mind to remember.
Scientific writing
What Mick Southern taught me was both the imperative to and the means of writing scientific prose—“if it’s not published it’s not done,” as a later adviser put it. Mock showed me that the rather dry technical requirements of scientific writing did not necessarily mean that elegance, humor, and even wit need be excluded from the scientists’ products.
A three-layered process of documentation
A three-layered process of documentation:
(1) First, there is the field notebook. This is where the actual numbers are recorded, together with passing observations relevant to the interpretation of these numbers.
Paper is still proving more durable than electronic data.
(2) The journal is a parallel record to that of the notebook—a daily account of events, thoughts, and observations.
(3) Last of the three strata, then, are the publications. Traditionally, in science, these are articles in academic journals leavened with chapters in books. To be successful, a young scientist need aspire to no more than these two forms of output together with their oral versions at interminable conferences and meetings of learned societies.
There came a time in my scientific development, however, when other forms of publication became important: magazines articles, and writing books.
Incidental details
In these journals lay the incidental details by which a book can be differentiated from a set of scientific articles. Such incidental details can become ends in themselves.
Memory prompts
Journals are memory prompts and perhaps capture exquisite (and not so exquisite) moments of experience.