Form vs. function: when is it okay for design to be weird?
When the sculptor Richard Serra was asked about the similarities between his art and Frank Gehry’s architecture — both distinguished by monumental torqued forms that warp one’s sense of space — Serra rejected the notion that Gehry was even an artist. Speaking in The New Yorker in 2002, he argued, “art is purposely useless…its significations are symbolic, internal, poetic — a host of other things — whereas architects have to answer to the program, the client, and everything that goes along with the utility function of the building.”
The idea that Gehry’s buildings aren’t art can be hard to process because they often look like sculpture, not concert halls, or museums, or office buildings; from the outside, one pays way more attention to their form and beauty than their functional purpose. However, while Gehry’s conceptual drawings may look like abstract art, his buildings aren’t inspired by (as Serra might say) purely “poetic” goals. Like many “starchitect”-designed buildings, Gehry’s distinctive designs operate as a sort of branding, differentiating the company, organization, or institution that has commissioned the building. This differentiation can serve many goals: to attract visitors and patrons, to help the developer compete in a real estate marketplace or increase lease prices, or even to revitalize a city.
Like architecture, most industrial and commercial arts often embrace brave, experimental style and aesthetics to differentiate brands, products, or services. Fashion and automotive design are largely organized around events — runway and car shows, respectively — that celebrate experimental, boundary-pushing designs as a means to chart future aesthetic trajectories (even ones that end up appearing “normal”); advertising has a long tradition of using idiosyncratic humor to stand out; industrial design is constantly seeking out new manufacturing techniques to enable distinctive forms; branding is constantly evolving through creative bravery.
However, one field of commercial design that produces far fewer weird, experimental experiences is the design of digital products. Unlike architecture, where the most famous designs are often the most unusual, the most ubiquitous digital product experiences — Amazon’s e-commerce experience, Netflix’s content browsing interface, Apple’s phone interface, for example — are rarely aesthetically differentiated. They may be sophisticated, friendly, bold, simple, elegant, or minimal, and they may be functionally unique, but they are seldom weird — or even all that attention-getting.
This is ironic given how fluid and flexible digital experiences can be. Indeed, the design of today’s most innovative and unusual buildings is only possible because of digital technology. But when looking at modern code-based art and algorithmically generated graphics and animations, there are scant examples of commercial digital products that mirror that sensibility in the way Serra’s sculpture and Gehry’s architecture feel related to one another.
There are many reasons for the relative uniformity of experience across digital products: interactive experiences are shaped primarily by how they behave, not how they look; platforms such as iOS and Android have design standards that products sitting on those platforms must comply with; relying on proven design patterns is fast and efficient; many companies are more technology-led than design-led; digital products compete in an incredibly fast-moving marketplace, and relying on proven design patterns is a safe bet.
But, fundamentally, the scarcity of formal experimentation in digital product design is driven by the fact that consumers expect (indeed, usually demand) them to be intuitively usable. Because of this, many digital products are largely constructed from familiar design patterns — carousels of images, tabs, forms, and so on — that vary little across digital products, favoring intuitive usability over expressive differentiation, even between competitors.
In contrast, simple objects like shoes or clothing can be strange because their appearance doesn’t necessarily affect their performance. And buildings — which are much more akin to digital products, composed of many different systems that must work together to create a functional experience — are able to be idiosyncratic in large part because they are always first approached from afar; they create an impression before you interact with spaces inside those buildings, and in those moments can be as weird as their builder wants.
But even the most expressive and outlandishly designed buildings are usually way less weird up close. Disney Hall transcends its sculptural attributes because it is a beautifully functional building. The seating in Disney Hall provides an intimate view of its stage throughout and has superb, world-class acoustics.
And the building’s most basic features are designed to be functional; inside a building in which no two pieces of the overall structure are the same, doors open and close just like doors usually do, and the steps of its staircases are of a standard, uniform height. Most digital products are the equivalent of staircases, elevators, light-switches, and doorknobs in buildings: functional objects that benefit from thoughtful design, but rarely from idiosyncrasy. There’s no contemplating the sculptural shape of a digital product or service from afar; it’s all up close and focused on details.
But it’s a mistake to think that digital product and service design doesn’t have room for formal experimentation. Designers just need to know where those opportunities lie.
These areas are no different from any other industrial or practical art and can be identified by looking at the intersection of form and function. Consider how design can range from the predictable and familiar to the surprising and idiosyncratic: how does a designer know how far along that spectrum their design can be? When is pushing formal boundaries wise, and when is it foolish? One way to know which areas are ripe for experimentation and which are risky is to consider the functional purpose of a given feature: does it facilitate a specific tangible outcome, such as the completion of a task, or does it enable an intangible experience? The facade of a building might be considered a primarily experiential feature, and as such can benefit from being daring and unusual, while signage that helps people get where they need to go might be considered an outcome or task-focused feature, and benefits from being predictable and intuitively understandable. In contrast, if the exterior of a building is predictable, it risks being dull; if its signage is weird, it risks being confusing.
In most digital products, there are fewer obvious places for formal experimentation than other fields of design, since utile functionality is usually digital products’ primary concern. Long gone are the days in which websites had an expressive “splash page” that greeted users, in the way the facade of a building makes an impression before somebody enters. Today, most websites and apps are designed almost entirely through the lens of enabling people to complete tasks as efficiently as possible. However, there also exist features and functionality that are more experiential than purely outcome-focused. To identify areas for formal experimentation, a designer has to identify which features are more experiential than task-focused.
For instance, while most digital products will benefit from navigation being familiar and intuitive, the design of content experiences presents an opportunity for experimentation, since people’s understanding and interpretation of content is inextricably linked to how information is presented or of how a story is told; content is necessarily experiential. This is often seen in promotional experiences, such as the page on Apple’s website marketing their AirPods, which blends photography, typography, and 3D graphics to create an expressive and enticing experience that celebrates the product’s sophisticated technology and design; once this interface has done its job selling, the user moves on to a much more predictable, straightforward interface designed to close the deal. (This is also why interfaces in sci-fi movies are often far more exciting and compelling than the interfaces we see in real life: they’re content, designed in service of a film’s story, not interfaces for use. In real life, most of them would not be very usable at all.)
Not all content is purely experiential, of course: while a billboard is more likely to achieve its goals of promoting a brand by being unique and expressive, a stop-sign (insofar as “STOP” is content) can only do its job by looking just like every other stop-sign. The New York Times has produced some of the web’s most compelling, original, and innovative digital storytelling but the majority of the Times’s content is displayed in a predictable, consistent form, enabling people to scan headlines and read articles as efficiently as possible.
Formal experimentation and innovation matter not only because they can be effective tools to differentiate an experience in service of a project’s strategic goals. They also matter because design innovation is how products connect to contemporary culture. Design both reflects and shapes culture, and its evolution is directly tied to our society’s progress — or regression — and what qualifies as “normal” or as “weird” is determined by society’s evolving sense of aesthetics. Commercial arts, such as architecture, fashion, and automotive design, play a clear role in this cultural discourse. Digital product design, which is just as ubiquitous in our daily lives, deserves to be part of that discourse — but to do so must find ways in which to be adventurous and take risks, and to be more than the undifferentiated front-end of the connected technologies that drive modern life. Thankfully, digital product design needn’t depend upon the starchitect model of design — which has been challenged as being un-collaborative, ego-driven, and patriarchal — to advance. The medium of digital experience is necessarily distributed and fungible, and bold and expressive ideas can come from anywhere. Designers just need to know when and where to upend the familiar.
