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
Ruins, Rub-outs, and Trash
Tracing paper into palimpsest
Kahn's preferred medium was charcoal. He liked to use the side of his hand to rub out the thing he was drawing in order to draw it over, and over again.
Turning the tracing paper into a palimpsest; where some trace of each previous marking is still there, only blurred out and faded back by Kahn's rubbings-out and re-renderings, so that in what he made there is also the record of how it was made.
Charcoal on trash collected over time acting as ersatz animated film recording how Kahn's ideas developed.
So insufficiently palimpsestic
I worry that unlike Kahn's process and tools, the processes and tools we use are aimed at helping us satisfy the demand for moving fast and breaking things, not to be good, or to better ensure the doing of good work.
My son Gerrit told me about a YouTube video from a conference where the presenter asked for a show of hands from video game developers in the audience who could produce or successfully compile their own code from the previous quarter. Or from the previous year. Or from two years ago. And by that time the point had been made: nobody had their hand in the air.
Good for the next man
Lou Kahn said that a house is only good if it's good for "the next man."
He knew that the likelihood of its spaces and places continuing to be loved after "the first man" has come and gone requires the kinds of attention to detail you'd have to be paying if the next man and the next-next man were embraced as stakeholders from the onset.