The other week, a stay in a fashionably modern-minimalist boutique hotel got me thinking about form and function. It might perhaps surprise anyone who visits my house or sees my desk, but I am a minimalist at heart. Pretty much everything I own tends to be clean in outline and devoid of frou-frou. I like my bowls simple, my tables straightforward, my clothes logo-free. I have a few possessions that deviate from this rule in small details, like a shirt with an embroidered neckline, but even then I'm not fond of fussy objects. I like clean lines and shapes, and things that are what they are.
Why the hotel made me think of this was because the objects in our hotel room were minimalist - but they were the beta version of minimalism. (Japanese design, pared down to its essentials over generations, is the polished final release.) The bathroom, in particular, epitomized the problems when form precedes function. The room was tiled, on the floors, one of the walls, and the entirety of the shower stall, in small black squares with an irridescent purple grain. The toilet was low and black. Lights were small and recessed. There were three circular mirrors, one large, two small. A clear glass wall and door separated the shower from the rest of the bathroom. The counter and sink were made of greenish-black slate; the sink itself was a flat-bottomed square depression. The drain stopper was a flat silver disc that rotated in the drain to permit or impede the flow of water. The knobs and faucets in shower and over sink were brushed metal pipes. There was a single low towel bar about five inches above the back of the toilet, and a single tubular knob projecting from the single plain white wall opposite the mirrors. Everything looked quite cool, but the functionality was haphazard.
I would not want to be the person who cleaned the bathroom. The flat bottom of the sink meant that it didn't drain properly. The glass and the tiles must have been very difficult to keep free of water marks and stains. The black toilet - ditto. (Using it was rather disturbing, like sitting atop a shiny black hole of nothingness.) The nearly unusable towel bar and knob made a mockery of the hotel's plea that guests reuse their towels to save energy and water. The lights were so small and recessed it was hard to get a good close-up view of oneself in the mirror. The knobs in the shower linked water temperature to not only the turn of the top dial, but to the flow of water, governed by a second rotating knob. (You'd turn the top knob all the way to full, which produced a stream of warm-to-hot water, and then you rotated the second one to produce either a soft spray of warm-to-hot water, or a narrow stream of hot.) The room was beautiful on the surface, but it needed another hundred years of people complaining and fiddling and polishing before it worked as well as it looked.
On the other hand, there are other things that are functional, but in which style is lacking - ugly sweaters, NYC taxi cabs, the average computer keyboard. Form can be given direction by function - a cup-holder will tend to be round and recessed, a writing implement tapering and cylindrical - but there are a lot of kludges out there in the world, things that do their job well enough that people tolerate a degree of inelegance and clunkiness. Off the rack clothing, for instance, which fits only a few people perfectly, and most people adequately, or airline or automobile seats, which fit no one well and everyone potentially.
It is in the point where form and function meet that you find perfection. The carved wooden bowl that fits perfectly in a single cupped hand, yet holds enough soup to fill your belly. That one pair of pants that flatters your shape without chafing or pinching or flapping. The pen that works so well that you cease to think about it as you write.
The problem is that this point is only reached through a long process of use and refinement. Design principles get you started, both with form and with function, but eventually the object will have to be put into use. People will use it in unexpected ways, holding their hair up with chopsticks, cleaning their nails with their pocket knives, whacking insects with their shoes, using screwdrivers to chip ice out of blocks. It is the use, the daily engagement of person with object, that eventually hones the form of a functional object. Intelligent design gets you faster off the starting block, but it is the slow process of fitting object to the demands of its environment, its evolution across generations of use, that makes it perfect.
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