Form and Function

I envy the freedom of poets to revel in the moldable, raw materiality of language:

Hexahedrons of wood and glass,
scarcely bigger than a shoebox,
with room in them for night and all its lights.

Monuments to every moment,
refuse of every moment, used:
cages for infinity.

Marbles, buttons, thimbles, dice,
pins, stamps, and glass beads:
tales of the time.
—From Objects & Apparitions by Octavio Paz, tr. by Elizabeth Bishop

The raw materials of designers like myself are far more rigid. I am a working designer and design educator, whose practice oscillates between product design, interaction design, data visualization, and engineering. I have designed dozens of things—in atoms, ink, words, and pixels—for companies and organizations, and supported many graduate students at Illinois Institute of Technology’s Institute of Design to do the same. I encounter new problems and tasks daily, and am privileged to engage my curiosity in novel and exciting application spaces every day. And yet I cannot help but feel encumbered by my discipline.

A designer’s poetic repertoire is broad but limited, not by the page but instead by attention, market forces, and an insatiable expectation for universalization. Materiality, surface finish, shape, and composition are rhyme and couplets, but without a poet’s expressive range. Often, in working with clients and evaluating design research, we designers seek the most efficient prototype, the minimum viable product, the shortest path to market. Reading poetry shakes these strictures, reframing how I evaluate efficacy and permanence—poems remind me to be open to interpretation, contextuality, and ornament.

The press of approximation
is confident

What is solid is
what is not visible

You look back at
the sculpture

Light has changed
with the progress of an hour
—From The Wire Sculpture by Eileen Tabios

For me, poetry offers a view into a very different, and refreshing, compromise between form and function. “Form ever follows function”—the architect Louis Sullivan’s famous rule—these words grate in the ears of every designer because they have been so widely misinterpreted. Sullivan was not inviting designers to subordinate expression to purpose. Rather, he had advised that expression and function are inseparable. That is: “Form naturally accompanies function,” not “form is subordinate to function.”

The most useful poets to me are, appropriately, some of Sullivan’s contemporaries. He himself was a poet, deeply inspired by the work of Walt Whitman, and the two enjoyed a somewhat one-sided correspondence. Their works similarly sought to reconcile the competing influences of a natural world full of phenomenal wonders, an uncertain and paradoxical inner voice, and ongoing technological transformation defined by limitless and imperfect promise.

To a man who can resolve himself into subtile unison with Nature and Humanity as you have done, who can blend the soul harmoniously with materials, who sees good in all and o’erflows in sympathy toward all things, enfolding them with his spirit: to such a man I joyfully give the name of Poet:—the most precious of all names.
—Louis Sullivan to Walt Whitman, February 3, 1887

The two sought to flatten the relationships between creator and audience, and recognized the possibility of collaborative audience participation—foreshadowing the methods of every human-centered contemporary designer. Both approached creation with a desire to beget legible, public, universally-valued outcomes alongside a drive to embed personal expression in their works.

More subtle, more intricate, more subjective than either pier or lintel, the arch has just so much more of man in it. We may therefore view it both as a triumph over an abyss and as the very crystallization of that abyss itself. It is a form so much against Fate, that Fate, as we say, ever most relentlessly seeks its destruction. Yet does it rise in power so graciously, floating through the air from abutment to abutment, that it seems ever, to me, a symbol and epitome of our own ephemeral span.
—From Kindergarten Chats by Louis Sullivan

Like Sullivan, I find inspiration in, and common cause with, poets and artists. In particular, Sullivan’s contemporaries (including the Romantics, the Orientalists, and the Symbolists) push me to challenge my own orthodoxies. In these poetic works ornament and structure collide only to be fully and playfully dissolved. The senses are exposed as imperfect intermediaries subject to many masters outside of the designer’s control:

O dreamer, that I may dive
In pure pathless joy, understand,
How by subtle deceits connive
To keep my wing in your hand.

A coolness of twilight takes
Its way to you at each beat
Whose imprisoned flutter makes
The horizon gently retreat.
—From Another Fan by Stéphane Mallarmé, tr. by A.S. Kline

These poetic works are freeing, and remind me to envision my own design as expression, existing in specific moments, settings, and hands—and not in an evacuated space filled only with drafted lines and Post-it notes. My personal and experimental work, freed from the expectations of clients and markets, explores how we can deeply embed our audience and their context in designed outcomes and experiences. My ongoing projects in hyper-customization and generative algorithms blend data visualization and product design, creating unique objects that embody personal meaning in form and materiality.

For example, the Manifesting the Look of Love series, a collaboration with Haelo Design, draws upon a long-shared history of wedding anniversary gifts and, through digital fabrication technologies, weaves how each married partner sees one another (as captured by gaze-tracking sensors) into a three-dimensional vessel. Each design is not only a functional object, but also a data visualization of its intended users at a specific moment in a human relationship.

I hope that these works expose a new way to synthesize my personal expression as a designer, the functional requirements of a designed object, and the intended user of the design into a poetic, bespoke form that carries a narrative located in time and place.

In the blank space between the following day and the previous night, you see the beauty of a propeller, for instance, and think, yes. I want that silver metal to mean something more than just flight.
—From A Model of a Machine by Mary Jo Bang

A well-used object has the potential to be an extraordinarily effective conduit for expression—a poem crystallized in form and function.

Manifesting the Look of Love (25 Years), 2014, by Haelo Design and Zach Pino