The Fallacy of Functionality

A few weeks ago I read Henry Petroski's latest book, The Essential Engineer, which centers on the differences between engineers and scientists and the work they each do. The footnotes of Petroski's book happily led me to Barry Allen's Artifice and Design, which I am certain I never would have come across otherwise.

Allen's book, among other things, explores the interrelationship between what turn out to be the arbitrarily divided fields of aesthetic and technical design. A good portion of Allen's book is dedicated to exposing the "Fallacy of Functionality." Under that heading, Allen writes:

Form follows function -- every word of this inane apothegm contains a mistake. Form does not "follow" from, or is not determined, derived, or entailed by, anything, least of all somebody's idea of function. ... Technical form is not deductive or calculated. It is underdetermined both by instrumental reason ("function") and the way the world works ("physics"). ...[T]here is no "one best way" to design anything, though there is often a
cheapest way. (p. 125)

Since there is no one best way to make anything technically complicated; since engineering thrives on alternatives and causes options to proliferate..., then technological design is evidently more like composing a symphony than solving an equation, and perception, the aesthetic interface, belongs to the technical conditions of the best work in engineering. (pp. 128-129)

The more complete and profound the conception of a technical problem, the more design approaches the conditions of art. Not "fine art" but working art, artful works, artistry in artifice, poiesis in the double sense of poetry and production, the poiesis of design, whether in a ship or in a sonnet. ...[T]he aesthetic moment cannot be eliminated from the technological design without undermining the best work (p. 181)

Allen supports his arguments with examples from the history of bridge construction, which resonate with me as an engineer, but he could just as easily (perhaps even more easily) support his arguments with examples from the field of architecture -- the field that originated the phrase "form follows function." What is eventually designed depends very heavily on decisions about how that thing will work AND how it will look. Often those initial decisions cannot be separated, and the results in any case can lead in a lot of different directions.