The Dilemma of Form Follows Function - DESK Magazine

But this is not who we are.

Look at the stone ax, designed millions of years ago. The earliest human beings created the tool, every one of them completely symmetrical, because we liked it that way, Sagmeister explains.

“It didn’t have to be symmetrical because of the functioning – you could skin that mammoth just as well with a non-symmetrical stone ax. But every one of them was symmetrical because we thought it was more beautiful.”

Even before had language, we knew beauty.

“This is in us, it’s part of being human,” Sagmeister says. “And the shit we are making now that is only functional is actually inhuman, meaning not made for human beings. This is not who we are.”

Loos wrote a piece titled “Ornament and Crime,” which said it’s criminal to spend time adding ornamentation to an object when it will eventually go out of style. He said we could only become civilized and modern once we were free from ornament. The Bauhaus school of art ran with the idea, taking it to a more extreme level. Everything became clean, bare, functional. Even Loos didn’t identify with it. Bauhaus’s idea of design fit well into economic times and soon enough, everyone was making things to function as tightly as possible.

“Form follows function.” We can thank American architect Louis Sullivan for that one. It means an object should be designed according to its purpose – a reasonable enough idea, and one that’s had a big influence on today’s design as we know it. Sullivan is often called “The father of the modernism” for how he shaped our way of thinking in the 20th century.

But we can blame a different architect for taking things one step too far: Meet Adolf Loos.

Loos lived in Austria during a period of historicism. Nothing was new. People were designing the way they’d seen it done in history.

Enter modernism.

At the height of this modernist movement in architecture, we see the insane industrialization of the Soviet Union with its “make it fast, make it work” mentality. Sagmeister estimates 250 million apartments churned out by Soviet Union during this time

We got so carried away with the idea of functionality, we lost sight of who we were designing for in the first place: humans.

Humans connect to the world through emotion. And design without beauty is void of emotion. We cannot resonate with it. We cannot exist happily in it.

Without beauty, we fail.

“I am absolutely, 100% convinced that the people who really figure out how to do something online that’s actually beautiful – which I don’t think really exists in the same way as it exists even in tech products – I think there will be unbelievable riches and incredible success associated with it.”

Beauty is function.

“This whole idea that beauty is skin deep and surface-like is kind of stupid,” Sagmeister says. “That’s a very deeply stupid idea. There is an unbelievable function in beauty.”

You can see beauty’s function in another lovely little thing, a live map of Manhattan created by the New England Complex System Institute. An algorithm analyzes Twitter messages across Manhattan to generate a colored map showing the sentiment of each area in real time. Red = negative. Green = positive.

“As you know there are two major train stations in Manhattan,” says Sagmeister. “There is Penn station, which is ugly. There is Grand Central, which is beautiful.”

At any given time you can check the map to see Penn Station is red. Grand Central Station is always green. That’s a direct function of beauty.

If you are designing with love and care, you will naturally think about function. You will see detail and symmetry. You will consider what is useful or what is pleasing aesthetically. You will determine what is excessive. You will see what’s right.

If we care about what we’re making, we will make beautiful things.

It’s just who we are.