The products or solutions that we use today have two distinct aspects - what does it do and how it looks. Lets assign labels to these two aspects, function and form respectively. Whatever we can see today can be identified using either one or both of them, for example, an office building, a social networking website or a newspaper. In each of these cases, both, the form and function comply with the underlying identification. Imagine the confusion if books and newspapers were designed to look the same!

The realisation is that function and form both support each other to make the product or solution usable. The question then is what precedes what! Should the function be designed first and then the form? Or the other way round?

Form Follows Function

This is a shorter version of the original dictum - Form ever follows function which was coined by the American architect Louis Sullivan. It was set as a pervading law that

in nature, all shapes express the inner life, the native quality, of the animal, tree, bird, fish, that they present to us; they are so characteristic, so recognizable, that we say, simply, it is ‘natural’ it should be so.

…

Whether it be the sweeping eagle in his flight or the open apple-blossom, the toiling work-horse, the blithe swan, the branching oak, the winding stream at its base, the drifting clouds, over all the coursing sun, form ever follows function, and this is the law.

There have been a lot of discussions whether this is a natural all pervading law or not. However, lets discuss this in the context of web design (which I think can be extended to generic software design).

Advantages as a Design Methodology

The biggest hurdle in designing is the starting point. There are simply so many options available that look equally merited that it gets difficult to choose any one of them and start. I believe, this paradigm can be employed as a design methodology to solve the problem.

What do you do when all information you have before you start designing is that you are supposed to design a piece of software? It gets a bit clearer when you are told that a corporate website has to be designed. More information regarding this - e.g., that it should give information about products, that it should host the quarterly results or that it should let the readers know about the news - brings in more clarity. The function serves as a guide to design the form. It guides the designer to narrow down the options and provide a starting point. The form now has a purpose or duty, if you will, of projecting the function that lies within. If the form does not honestly bind with the function then the function might end up being not usable.

The optimum benefits are derived through the combination of the best function design and the best form design. Form follows function, in fact, dictates that every function can have only one formal solution, and hence only one form.

The Oppositions

The disadvantage is that it is purely a functionalist approach and might lack aesthetic appeal. This is where a lot of designers have opposed this paradigm. The form design is not made to please anyone, it is made to use the function. This works fine if you catering to an wide range of audience. By not pandering to anyone’s taste, the design is acceptable to everyone. However, this can cause problems sometimes when you are catering to a closed group.

Another rant has been that designers felt bound by the rule of one form design per function. However website design, or for that matter even architectural design or industrial design is a combination of art and engineering both. The aspect of art always provides more than one option. Form follows function tended to kill the contribution of art in designs.

Form follows function?, actually no by Bruce Deitrick Price is one of the better ones I have come across. He provides some examples, but in the general domain.

Okay, you’re thinking, what is the point here? Explain yourself. Easy! In half the cases where this cliché is used, it’s a trivial and stupendously empty tautology. A knife or scissors is sharp by definition. A knife not sharp ceases to be a knife. Look in the dictionary–cutting will always be mentioned. Anyone saying that a sharp knife is an example of form following function is like somebody piously asserting a circle is round or a square has exactly four sides.

However, design of the knife for cutting will also include the shape and the material which is not part of the definition. The shape and material to use for the knife will be dependent on the fact that it is to be used for cutting.

This probably leads into another possible problem. That an object might have to perform multiple functions and not just one, which the article addresses next. Designing it based on isolated functions is going to harm the entire design. Which is where even my rant starts, that the design will have to be inclusive of all the functions, and more aspects. A modification of this, Form and Function follow Vision can attempt to solve this problem.

Form and Function follow Vision

Should form follow only the function is my doubt. I think the form design has to consider the usage, the users and to some extent even the context it will be used in. For example, Digg is a site where users submit and vote stories. It has resulted into a site which can be used to get all the top stories. It is however important for Digg designers to consider the skill level of the users who submit and vote for the stories. They also have to consider what technologies to support while designing the website. Digg can also be considered as a social networking site where a user can make friends. The form design will have to consider all this, none of them can be opted out.

One more observation regarding software is that more than often users use it in new innovative ways, like the XMHD (Gmail Hard Drive). Of course, these cannot be predicted, but a flexible design can help.

Which is why lets look at the vision with which the product or solution, in our case the website, is being designed. The function and form design both should use the vision as the guide. Form has to interact with the function, that not dependent only on it. The vision includes many factors - the multiple functions, the stakeholders, the target users and is inherently longterm. It also removes the mandate of only one form design because there are other aspects that affect the form design.

I have heard about many combinations of form and function - function follows form or form is function. What do you use? How do you start your design? Do you use a methodology or is it adhoc? Do contribute.

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