1. ⁘  ⁘  ⁘
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  38. brutalism 7
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  56. choice 8
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  64. Collison, Simon 3
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  66. commonplace 11
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  70. connection 24
  71. constraints 25
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  74. Corbusier, Le 13
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  81. Cross, Nigel 12
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  175. interfaces 37
  176. intuition 8
  177. invention 10
  178. Irwin, Robert 65
  179. Isaacson, Walter 28
  180. Ishikawa, Sara 33
  181. iteration 13
  182. Ive, Jonathan 6
  183. Jackson, Steven J. 14
  184. Jacobs, Jane 54
  185. Jacobs, Alan 5
  186. Jobs, Steve 20
  187. Jones, Nick 5
  188. Kahn, Louis 4
  189. Kakuzō, Okakura 23
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  192. Keller, Jenny 10
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  199. Kleon, Austin 13
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  202. knowledge 29
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  207. language 20
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  218. MacWright, Tom 5
  219. Magnus, Margaret 12
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  223. Markson, David 16
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  235. Miller, J. Abbott 10
  236. Mills, C. Wright 9
  237. minimalism 10
  238. Miyazaki, Hayao 30
  239. Mod, Craig 15
  240. modularity 6
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Function, Functionality, Functionalism

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  • It passes by the river

    "Artists need to be in there from the start, making the argument for quality. The key to this thing is, for example, if you give an engineer a set of criteria which does not include a quality quotient, as it were—that is, if this sense of the quality, the character of the place, is not a part of his original motivation—he will then basically put the road straight down the middle. He has no reason to curve it. But if I can convince him that quality is absolutely a worthwhile thing and we can work out a way in which the road can be efficient and also wander down by the river, then we essentially have both: he provides his sort of expertise in that the road works, I provide quality in that it passes by the river. In that way, art gets built into the criteria from the beginning rather than being added on afterward."

    Lawrence Wechler & Robert Irwin, Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees
    1. ​​We want you to work with an artist​​
    2. ​​The problem with ornament​​
    • quality
    • design
    • function
    • collaboration
  • The requirements of economy

    Economy is the mother of most inventions, not necessity, unless in the sense of poverty and hardship. A requirement for convenience is simply a diluted requirement for ease and economy.

    It seems to be invariably true that those characteristics which lead people to call a design functional are derived from the requirements of economy and not of use.

    David Pye, The Nature and Aesthetics of Design
    1. ​​Form follows function​​
    2. ​​Economy of material and labor​​
    • function
  • Useless work on useful things

    Anyone can verify by simple observation two important facts.

    The first is, that whenever humans design and make a useful thing they invariably expend a good deal of unnecessary and easily avoidable work on it which contributes nothing to its usefulness.

    The second fact is that all useful devices have got to do useless things which no one wants them to do. Who wants car to get hot? Or to wear out its tires? Or to make a noise and a smell?

    David Pye, The Nature and Aesthetics of Design
    1. ​​The works of God​​
    2. ​​If you have to do tedious work​​
    3. ​​We might as well make them beautiful​​
    4. ​​Against form follows function​​
    5. ​​Combinations and arrangements​​
    • function
  • The minimum condition

    When a device is so designed that its component parts are only just strong enough to get the intended result without danger of failure, we may say it is in its minimum condition.

    I suspect that the functionalists sometimes meant by functional design simply design aimed at the minimum condition for a device. In that case 'form should follow function' would mean that every system should be in its minimum condition, thus having certain limitations imposed on its form.

    David Pye, The Nature and Aesthetics of Design
    1. ​​Form follows function​​
    • function
    • constraints
    • design
    • minimalism
  • Form eschews function

    Many of the most contemporary silverware patterns appear to be designed more for how the pieces look than for how they work...There is a kind of design that can ignore function entirely. We might say that this is a "form eschews function" school of design, and one that places considerations of aesthetics, novelty, and style above everything else.

    But to design from the handle is to shoot from the hip when it comes to silverware, for the business end of the individual pieces is where the action is going to be. Though Emily Post may not have perceived that tradition emerges out of the minimization of failure, there is no excuse for a designer to overlook the fact. Yet this is exactly what modern product designers seem to do when they strive so hard for a striking new look that they throw out function with tradition.

    Henry Petroski, The Evolution of Useful Things
    • function
    • fashion
  • Feeble and ugly

    Thus in order to be called mingei an object must be wholesomely and honestly made for practical use. This calls for the careful selection of material, the employment of methods that are in keeping with the work to be done, and attention to detail. It is only this that produces bona fide objects that will be of practical use in life. Looking at recent works, however, what one sees is an emphasis on visual appreciation over utility and the cutting of corners in the production process, resulting in objects that can only be called feeble and ugly.

    Yanagi Sōetsu, What is Folk Craft?
    • details
    • function
    • objects
  • Functionalism can be a kind of religion

    We are not now inclined to regard modern heating and cooling systems as representative of a spiritual realm. The physical principles involved in their operation are thoroughly understood; there is no mystery about them. They are simply functional, designed according to straightforward engineering practice to serve their intended function as efficiently and conveniently as possible.

    And yet functionalism itself can be a kind of religion.

    ...From the fifties and sixties we have inherited numerous heating and cooling systems created within an ethos of universal convenience. Machines to maintain our thermal comfort were conceived of as mechanical servants, providing for our every need while, like an English butler, remaining as unobtrusive as possible.

    Lisa Heschong, Thermal Delight in Architecture
    1. ​​Humble servants​​
    • function
  • Each element performs many functions

    Each element in the system should be chosen and placed so that it performs as many functions as possible.

    Bill Mollison, Introduction to Permaculture
    1. ​​The multiplicity of living patterns​​
    • function

    "A pond can be used for irrigation, watering livestock, aquatic crop, and fire control. A dam wall functions as a road, a firebreak, and a bamboo production area."

  • The informing idea of functionalism

    The informing idea of functionalism is what is called elegance by engineers and scientists—the notion that the best solution to a problem (whether applied to a mathematical proof, a machine, or an organizational diagram) is the most succinct. This conceit collapses the technical, the ethical, and the aesthetic, which powers the idea exponentially.

    Michael Sorkin, 20 Minutes in Manhattan
    1. ​​The Nature and Aesthetics of Design​​
    • function
    • aesthetics
  • Same name in the same basket

    Does a concert hall ask to be next to an opera house? Can the two feed on one another? Will anybody ever visit them both, gluttonously, in a single evening, or even buy tickets from one after going to a performance in the other?

    In Vienna, London, Paris, each of the performing arts has found its own place, because all are not mixed randomly. The only reason that these functions have all been brought together in Lincoln Center is that the concept of performing art links them to one another. The organization is born of the mania every simple-minded person has for putting things with the same name into the same basket.

    Christopher Alexander, A City Is Not a Tree
    1. ​​Such plans were deemed efficient​​
    2. ​​The plan must anticipate all that is needed​​
    • order
    • cities
    • function
  • The plan must anticipate all that is needed

    Ebenezer Howard set spinning powerful and city-destroying ideas: He conceived that the way to deal with the city’s functions was to sort and sift out of the whole certain simple uses, and to arrange each of these in relative self-containment.

    And he conceived of good planning as a series of static acts; in each case the plan must anticipate all that is needed and be protected, after it is built, against any but the most minor subsequent changes.

    Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities
    1. ​​Same name in the same basket​​
    • planning
    • function
  • The element becomes a sign

    Each unit can be seen purely as form, as what it is. Or it can be viewed as having a function. Its function is only understandable within the next higher level of organization. And in every case, function must succumb to the constraints of form. Once this worldly function is assigned, the element becomes a ‘sign’. It falls into the realm of concept. There is a mapping from one thought system to another.

    Margaret Magnus, Gods of the Word
    1. ​​Form follows function​​
    • form
    • function
  • Classical absurdity

    Corbusier observed that the requirements of flight of necessity rid airplanes of all superfluous decoration and so unwittingly transformed them into successful pieces of architecture. To place a Classical statue atop a house was as absurd as to add one to a plane, he noted, but at least by crashing in response to this addition, the plane had the advantage of rendering its absurdity starkly manifest.

    Alain de Botton, The Architecture of Happiness
    1. ​​Shorten the wings​​
    2. ​​Towards a New Architecture​​
    3. ​​Form follows function​​
    • function
  • 205. Structure Follows Social Spaces

    Problem

    No building ever feels right to the people in it unless the physical spaces (defined by columns, walls, and ceilings) are congruent with the social spaces (defined by activities and human groups).

    Solution

    A first principle of construction: on no account allow the engineering to dictate the building’s form. Place the load bearing elements—the columns and the walls and floors—according to the social space of the building; never modify the social spaces to conform to the engineering structure of the building.

    Christopher Alexander, Murray Silverstein & Sara Ishikawa, A Pattern Language
    1. ​​Form follows function​​
    • ux
    • function
  • Roaming and capricious

    Now I sometimes wonder whether the current of utility has not become too strong and whether there would be sufficient opportunity for a full life if the world were emptied of some of the useless things that give it spiritual significance; in other words, whether our conception of what is useful may not have become too narrow to be adequate to the roaming and capricious possibilities of the human spirit.

    Abraham Flexner, The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge
    • function
    • spirit
  • What are those borders made of?

    Functionalist modern architecture has prioritized the functionality of interiors and treated surfaces and external appearances as an outcome of that priority. Diagrams illustrating functional layouts generally frame them with thick borders. Updating conventional program theory entails questioning what those thick borders are actually made of, and how they should be designed. A dynamic program theory should be one that turns these thick borders into more organic interfaces that will foster exchanges and interactions.

    Toshiharu Naka, Two Cycles
    • function
    • architecture
  • Presentable

    I have sometimes wondered whether our unconscious motive for doing so much useless work is to show that if we cannot make things work properly we can at least make them presentable.

    David Pye, The Nature and Aesthetics of Design
    • ornament
    • function

    The inverse of Red Green's maxim:

    If the women don't find you handsome, they should at least find you handy.

  • A strangely negative character

    Utility has a strangely negative character. We speak of the secret of happiness, for its causes are elusive; but there is no secret about the causes of unhappiness: thirst, hunger, want of sleep, exhaustion, pain, constraint of movement and too great heat and cold, are evils which can effectively prevent happiness. Utility has a negative character, because useful devices are adopted in the main for the sake ultimately of avoiding such evils.

    From the fact that deadly injury, pain, and exhaustion prevent the fulfillment of the universal wish for happiness, we have always tended to infer that if only life were safe, comfortable, and effortless, we would be happy. It does not follow.

    David Pye, The Nature and Aesthetics of Design
    • function
    • happiness
  • Sine qua non

    What we see of a device is rarely the essential part, the sine qua non, but nearly always the superstructure which economy has imposed on it.

    It seems that the work we call purely utilitarian is not more useful than its more ornamental counterpart. It is merely more economical.

    David Pye, The Nature and Aesthetics of Design
    • function
    • ornament
  • The contribution that something in them yet compelled them to make

    Makers and designers must gradually have come inwardly to believe that half their work had been mere frivolity because it had been avoidable, and because some of it had contributed nothing to the satisfaction of people's material wants. This must have affected them like a conviction of original sin.

    The idea that utility was the purpose of work overpowered them and seemed unanswerable. From that time on perhaps the artist and workman have been weakened by an inward suspicion that they are supporting a lost cause. They have perhaps half-believed that the world could get on very well without the contribution that something in them yet compelled them to make.

    David Pye, The Nature and Aesthetics of Design
    • function
  • Something more is required

    Efficiency, the capability of performing effectively, never made anything beautiful yet and it justifies no design in itself. To say of a design 'it works, it does its job', or 'it gets the intended result' no more commends or excuses it than to say of a man 'he has never actually defrauded anybody'. That is not what virtue means! Something more is required.

    David Pye, The Nature and Aesthetics of Design
    • function
  • Mechanisms and organisms

    "Kant described a mechanism as a functional unity, in which the parts exist for one another in the performance of a particular function.

    An organism, on the other hand, is a functional and structural unity in which the parts exist for and by means of one another in the expression of a particular nature.

    This means that the parts of an organism – leaves, roots, flowers, limbs, eyes, heart, brain – are not made independently and then assembled, as in a machine, but arise as a result of interactions within the developing organism."

    — Brian Goodwin, How the Leopard Changed His Spots

    Ursula M. Franklin, The Real World of Technology
    • nature
    • evolution
    • growth
    • design
    • function
  • The center of the way

    The advice I’ve received from those who are close to the center of this timeless way of building is to start small. Like with a piece of tile, or a tea tray. And to then imagine along with Christopher Alexander:

    What it would be like
    to live in a mental world
    where one’s reasons
    for making something
    functionally
    and one’s reasons
    for making something
    a certain shape,
    or in a certain
    ornamental way
    are coming
    from precisely
    the same place
    in you
    .

    Dan Klyn, What Good Means
    • function
    • making
  • The Evolution of Useful Things

    A Book by Henry Petroski

    Here, then, is the central idea: the form of made things is always subject to change in response to their real or perceived shortcomings, their failures to function properly. This principle governs all invention, innovation, ingenuity.

    1. ​​Spike and spon​​
    2. ​​Shaped and reshaped​​
    3. ​​Form follows failure​​
    4. ​​Their wrongness is somehow more immediate​​
    5. ​​A small corner of the world of things​​
    1. ​​The evolution of devices​​
    • form
    • function
    • invention
    • progress
    • failure
  • The usages of life

    A Fragment by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc
    victorianweb.org

    During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries architects not only paid attention to internal arrangements, but subordinated the designs for the exterior to them. The usages of life dictated the arrangement and the arrangement suggested the form of the building. This was the dominant principle in times of Classical Antiquity and the Middle Ages.

    1. ​​The Timeless Way of Building​​
    2. ​​Form follows function​​
    • architecture
    • function
  • Form follows function

    A Quote by Louis Sullivan
    en.wikipedia.org
    1. ​​205. Structure Follows Social Spaces​​
    2. ​​Classical absurdity​​
    3. ​​The element becomes a sign​​
    4. ​​The requirements of economy​​
    5. ​​Against form follows function​​
    6. ​​The minimum condition​​
    7. ​​Form follows failure​​
    8. ​​The usages of life​​
    • form
    • function
    • design
    • architecture
  • Against form follows function

    An Essay by Andrea Resmini
    andrearesmini.com

    I cannot get past the fact that any *designer* who throws that phrase around matter-of-factly, as in “of course form follows function”, comes out as a complete ignoramus. An ignoramus who's not just repeating an 1896 “law” without any clues as to what it means but who also, most poignantly, demonstrates to possess no knowledge of what has happened in design and architecture since Sullivan and Adler contributed to inventing the high rise building and, by extension, much of the world we live in.

    1. ​​Useless work on useful things​​
    2. ​​Form follows function​​
    3. ​​Form follows failure​​
    • form
    • function
    • architecture
  • UI and Capability

    An Article by Ryan Singer
    rjs.medium.com
    Screenshot of rjs.medium.com on 2021-09-05 at 1.39.21 PM.png

    I’m very conscious of whether I am affording a feature or styling it. It’s important to distinguish because they look the same from a distance.

    ...Affording a capability and styling it are both important. But it’s essential to know which one you are doing at a given time. Style is a matter of taste. Capability and clarity are not. They are more objective. That person standing at the edge of the chasm cares more about accomplishing their task than the details of the decor.

    • function
    • style
    • design
  • Embracing design constraints

    An Article by Adrian Roselli
    adrianroselli.com

    Constraints 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.

    • design
    • constraints
    • accessibility
    • function
  • A Plea for Lean Software

    An Essay by Niklaus Wirth
    cr.yp.to

    Software'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.

    1. ​​Measured by the number of its features​​
    2. ​​Essential vs. nice to have​​
    3. ​​Dependence is more profitable than education​​
    4. ​​The most rewarding iterations​​
    5. ​​Never enough time​​
    1. ​​A grossly obese set of requirements​​
    2. ​​Features and complexity​​
    • software
    • performance
    • function
  • Beauty in flight

    A Quote
    paulgraham.com

    All 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

    1. ​​I choose a world with pyramids​​
    2. ​​Taste for Makers​​
    • beauty
    • function
    • flight

See also:
  1. design
  2. architecture
  3. form
  4. ornament
  5. constraints
  6. happiness
  7. minimalism
  8. spirit
  9. order
  10. cities
  11. nature
  12. evolution
  13. growth
  14. quality
  15. collaboration
  16. making
  17. ux
  18. planning
  19. aesthetics
  20. beauty
  21. flight
  22. details
  23. objects
  24. software
  25. performance
  26. accessibility
  27. style
  28. fashion
  29. invention
  30. progress
  31. failure
  1. David Pye
  2. Christopher Alexander
  3. Henry Petroski
  4. Alain de Botton
  5. Abraham Flexner
  6. Toshiharu Naka
  7. Margaret Magnus
  8. Ursula M. Franklin
  9. Lawrence Wechler
  10. Robert Irwin
  11. Dan Klyn
  12. Murray Silverstein
  13. Sara Ishikawa
  14. Louis Sullivan
  15. Jane Jacobs
  16. Michael Sorkin
  17. Bill Mollison
  18. Lisa Heschong
  19. Yanagi Sōetsu
  20. Niklaus Wirth
  21. Adrian Roselli
  22. Ryan Singer
  23. Andrea Resmini
  24. Eugène Viollet-le-Duc