Form + Function

"Form follows function — that has been misunderstood. 

Form and function should be one, joined in a spiritual union." 

—Frank Lloyd Wright

In these readings' (and videos') discussions of idea and form, I got to thinking a lot about the inevitability of both. More specifically, I got to thinking about how everything we make has some body or form, however transient, and some idea or intention, however slight. We often say that something has more or less form, like alphabetic writing is more 'masculine' or photo albums are more 'tactile', but I think that making those distinctions can also be dangerous, because it suggests differences in how we consume things. Really, there's only one way we consume anything: through tactile or sensual experience.

Form (almost) minus function. (Body - Intent)

Therefore, instead of thinking about how we can make alphabetic writing more 'bodily', can we embrace the fact that it obviously already has body, and work to make the body that it has more effective without changing the medium itself?

Let's make like Berlow and zoom out for a minute. Over on the visual arts side of campus, a subject that comes up a lot is the Bauhaus. This was a school of design that held the motto "form follows function". They believed that the form of an object — its design or physicality — should always be changed or messed with only if it did not negatively affect (and hopefully in fact benefited) an object's function, or intent. What's curious about the Bauhaus is that they were revolutionary in their teaching methods: they did not discriminate between the disciplines of architecture, design, construction, and art. Yet they insisted on polarizing form and function.

Like the paradigms we were breaking last week, we can see how easily these polarities crack. On the left and right I have two objects: the one, a drop of ink in a glass of water. It is a form, (almost) without a function — it has a physical body, is complex and aesthetic, yet its body and aestheticism is not aligned or condensed toward any particular function, or purpose.  The other is an industrial chair. It is a function, (almost) without a form. It has intent, it has a very clearly articulated purpose, but only (comparatively) limited thought has been given on its aesthetic, or its body. Put another way, those terrible school chairs you sit in all day have zero lumbar support because they're made with the idea of sitting in without taking into account how best to embody that function effectively.

Function (almost) minus form (Intent - Body)

Zooming back in a bit, we can see that this fails to take into account that by merely existing, something cannot escape the physical form. Form is how we experience any idea, or function/intent. And it fails to take into account that by merely being created intentionally, something cannot escape function, or motivation of purpose. If all this compartmentalizing and term-labeling has been confusing up to this point, this is why: as conscious, bodily beings we automatically want and need to merge form and function, we want to see them both as they are: indivisible. All distinction between them becomes fuzzy because, as with the clashes we're running into with Berhardt, McCandless, Solomon, and the others, you can't change form without changing function. And you can't have form without function. As McCandless goes into, by giving form to things, we can 'shape' the data — we can give it some body. By definition, form and idea are inseparable. You change the presentation, you change the idea itself. Therefore, data visualization is a way of changing that data. It is a way of personalizing data and controlling how people consume it. By singling out certain criteria, by showing things in certain groupings or patterns, we are giving it a new body and therefore a new life.

What I loved about Bernhardt was that he met alphabetic text where is (at least before he got into the Wetland flyer examples). He dissects the patterns (the forms) we look for in text, and how they are inseparable from and intrinsic to the meaning. He explains that in non-visual text, rhetorical control is exercised through "familiar strategies of essay composition… with each section performing particular functions" (67). However, on the next page he says that "this characterization of expository text is based on one sort of writing, that enshrined in the handbooks of our trade" (68). But the ideas are seeming to push that all discourses have a set of ethos, a set of expectations and requirements of varying strictness, and it is through these subconscious sequences of expectations and fulfillments or expectations and failures that meaning of a non-visual text is made or lost. Alphabetic-textual stories come in different styles, in other words: Lab report, novel, manifesto, constitution, poem, menu, screenplay, program code, crime report, personal notes, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

What I'm wondering is where that pattern means that down to the sentence, (down to the letter, if you want to get anal about it) form is essential to meaning. In bodies of alphabetic text, form is largely begotten by pattern, or the structure of repetition. This thing largely considered formless (Bernhardt uses the word 'homogenized') does indeed have a form, then, however much the masculine ideals in the past would like to say that through writing they have developed 'pure idea', or however much in this class we talk about 'improving' that homogenized text through photo, design, structure, or the like.

But I have a hunch that there's more magic to alphabetic text than just the forms we can see. Because there are whole other forms that arise as we make connections and do all that lovely internal closure stuff with text. That is what fascinates me about alphabetic text. Not its lack of form, but its latent form, the kind that can only be expanded by readers. No question, the forms Bernhardt describes are wonderfully useful in getting our meanings across. But our word choices within those visible forms create a form in our heads that is much less tangible, and more luminous.

Down to our cells, we are built of the union of form and function. Why can't our texts?