Form Follows Function

I had a programmer say to me in jest today "Art and beauty always take a back seat".

Well, I'm not sure what art is, but I think of beauty as ease. Beauty is gives us flow in life, allows us to go, do, and see what we want, when we want. It's the space we make for the things we love.

My colleague and I use "Form Follows Function" on our website for our philosophy when building software. He's a "developer" and I'm a "designer", and the problem with us seems to lie in the fact that we can't agree upon who is the form and who is the function. He's listed as the Function on the website, and I as the "Form". So I guess my interfaces are supposed to follow the functionality that he's building.

It seems like it would work, right? The pretty floral pattern that covers the chair that holds the springs, and the wood, and the... damn hardness that makes the friggin' thing so uncomfortable to sit on! It's sturdy, but I certainly don't want to sit there for a long time.

And this is where I think that many people misunderstand, and devalue exactly what design is.

I used to think of art and design as synonymous, now I'm not so sure. Having lived in both worlds, I know that each carries a broad range of perception. Art is going to take me a long time to define, but I think I finally have a grasp on what design is... or at least my philosophy about it. It seems safer to me to define this. Maybe because I have been more successful, at least monetarily, with it.

I came to my conclusion about design, from living 41 years in the world that I do. I've had chimney fires, and faucets drip, roofs leak, and a ceased engine. I've worn off-gassing plastic clothes, thrown out 10 tons of trash, and ruined books by getting them wet. I've taken the time to watch the sunset every day for a year, and I've climbed 1000 trees. I've learned the names of all the plants in my yard, and which ones I can actually eat. I've failed at gardening for the rights of the weeds.

Design is way of directing a user, and it's about intention. I've heard so many people say, "Oh I hate what they've done to facebook! It's so hard for me to get around!". I have to respond to the fact that facebook contains a butt-load of ads, and the more time you spend on that interface, the more your exposure, the higher the cost of those ads.

Design can keep you in a place where you don't want to be, or it can gather information that you can't get rid of. It can help you to do your job, or let you share something with loved ones thousands of miles away. And it can do all of these things without you even realizing that it exists. It is powerful and silent when it works, or loud and uncomfortable when it doesn't.

I gave my eight year old daughter a flashlight to put batteries into. She kept insisting that she couldn't get the bottom off. When I looked at it, it seemed like the bottom should come off, but it didn't. It simply looked that way. Being as there are no ads posted on the side of the flashlight, I know this wasn't done to keep her looking at it longer. It certainly wasn't planned obsolescence. Maybe it was an aesthetic choice?

Eventually it will end up in my mass of 10 tons of garbage, it's pretty red color faded in the sun of some landfill, it's little extra nodes of shiny plastic broken and cracking - It's "beauty" pushed to the "backseat".

If we equate design with beauty, then we need to redefine what beauty is. To me Beauty is about Function.

Killing Time

Simply to start this blog, I've sacrificed a half hour of my time: thinking of a name, deciding on a design, fighting with an interface. I ended up on design sites, and math sites, and Wikipedia, over and over and over again. This can all be considered "research", I guess, but I'd simply like to label it as "a waste of time".

Maybe I have the wrong tool? Before the internet, I simply would have picked up a notebook and started scribbling away. Do you remember that time where there was a space between typewriters and keyboards? I do.

I would have done my bit, with slight care as to what had been "taken" and what had been "done", and I would have thought myself a genius in the realm of what I was doing. It would have taken some time for me to figure out that my ideas were not unique, or maybe I never would.

I'm trying to figure out if time has become more or less precious in our digital age. I'm not seasoned enough as a designer to remember the days of rubylith, but I certainly am old enough to say, "Before I designed for the web, that typo would have been a nightmare. I had such printing anxiety back then!". And I certainly type faster than I can write these days.