to Artful Design • Chapter 1: “Design Is ______”
Peter Li
10/1/2024
Music 256A / CS476a, Stanford University
Reading Response: Function ↔️ Design ↔️ Form
From this week's reading, I'd like to respond to Artful Design Principle 1.6, which states:
Principle 1.6: Design is an Interplay Between Function and Form
—where artful design should be focused on “making useful things” that are “capable of aesthetic judgment”, which in return upholds the idea that form and function could coexist instead of being contradictory. (“Long live form-and-function!”)
The idea that design is a combination of both pragmatics and aesthetics invites me to reflect on my past experiences and think of them in a way I never imagined before. I realize that I have been subconsciously separating the ideas of form and function (i.e. the connection being “dead”) when I perform my tasks. This is especially the case because I study two things that are very different – computer science and music (surprising, I know), and they have mainly been parts of life without much intersection (before my involvement in Stanford Laptop Orchestra earlier this year, that is). Allow me to explain.
Whenever I’m working on something CS-related, I feel like I am an engineer – that is, I’m purely problem-solving when coding, as most of it is for CS classes. I focused almost all of my time on ensuring the correctness of my code instead of any other creative features it could offer besides the requirements. Sure I thought about the style of my code, but it was still me abiding to requirements set by classes (such as where curly braces should go, what commands to not use, etc.) in an almost robotic manner. I felt like I had a clear set of goals to accomplish and wasn’t really designing much.
While coding takes up much of my time during school, I am fortunate enough to be able to study music, which I hold near and dear to my heart. This is where I tend to create art with little to no regard for practicality. The main purpose of me making music is to express myself, for myself. I try to incorporate my emotions and what I was going through, both positive and negative, into my compositions. This feels much more like designing than coding (before SLOrk), but falls short of the pragmatic factor that artful design should fulfill, as I have never really written music to serve any specific function/purpose.
This principle is making me realize that the combination and coexistence of function and form is not only possible but encouraged. I recalled my experience at SLOrk this past spring, where I engaged in something I never did before – coding music. Although I was almost clueless at first, I slowly learned to code not just to algorithmically solve outlined problems, but to create artistic expressions that have never been done before and will never be done again. Perhaps that was one of my first artful designs. Perhaps I have artfully designed many more things before that without me knowing. Alas, with this principle in mind I shall now take notes during daily life and reflect on how I can design more artfully.
Design Etude 1
Item 1: Union Sq/Market St Station on the SF Central Subway (MUNI). I noticed this on my way to SF Chinatown.
Means and ends: while functionally this item serves as an underground rapid transit center that serves both BART and MUNI, what grabbed my eye was the complex design of the station mezzanine. While the station could be a plain underground box with a passageway to the platform, the station designers incorporated a complex set of LED lights at the top of the mezzanine (shown in blue in the image, they alternate to other colors such as red). What I also thought was amazing is how the passageway from the mezzanine (above) to the platform (below, not pictured) is designed. Instead of a narrow, dark staircase/escalator space, a huge area is carved out with wide, long horizontal “pillars” attached above where passengers would stand. While these “pillars” don’t have to be there as I doubt they contribute much to the structural integrity of the station, I love the grandiose, modernist aesthetic they provide as I think it adds so much to the overall architectural style of the station.
Item 2: Dinosaur-head-shaped Mug. Discovered in the cup shelf at Terra.
Means and ends: I find the design of this cup to be so striking, in a beautiful way. While most cups are cylindrical, this cup has a non-standard shape, which makes it unique. Not only that, but the whole cup is designed to look like a dinosaur head with the cup handle looking like the dinosaur’s ear. This is such a clever combination of function and form, as the cup handle’s function is for people to lift the cup easily, while its form suggests that it is part of the dinosaur’s character. The irregular shape contributes to the cup’s function as well. While the cup has a dinosaur head form, the area bulging outward at the “nose” and “teeth” of the dinosaur corresponds to a greater overall volume of the cup. In other words, the left area in the image holds water as well as the normal cylindrical section. I really like how the designers used the bold design to their advantage to craft a cup of large volume with a convenient handle.
Item 3: Love Arrow Measurement Cup. Discovered in Terra kitchen while I was cooking.
Means and ends: While I didn’t notice at first when I was using it to measure different kinds of oils, I later realized that this measurement cup is shaped like a Cupid’s arrow. Similar to the pencil case, there is no functional reason for it to be shaped like that (most measurement cups are cylindrical with a standard handle), but the heart shape and the arrow decorations at the end of the handle makes this measurement cup so much more elegant than the others. As I used it more, I realized that the Cupid’s arrow form contributes to the item’s function as well, where pouring the liquid inside the cup is a continuation of the direction the arrow is pointing to. In other words, it felt as if Cupid shot an arrow from the end of the cup handle to the pot I was dumping the oil into. Neat!
Guerrilla Design: Custom Envelope
I decided to add some flavor to something my family and I receive and send in daily life – envelopes. I wanted to change the pure white, bland nature of envelopes to make an envelope that displayed my characteristics so that the receiver could see it and say “Ah! This must be from Peter”. I printed and cut bits of images that reflected what I was thinking about recently, which was the idea of “what if we aren’t us and what would our lives be like?”. Imagine a world where everyone delivers mail using their very own custom envelopes that they designed themselves…
Sounds with ChucK
I created a "siren generator" that takes input from the keyboard, which maps 12 keys to sirens of differnet pitch and oscillation frequencies depending on which key is pressed. Click on the button below to open the ChucK file, copy the code and run "chuck sirens.ck" in the terminal, and press letter keys on the lower 2 rows of the keyboard to try it out. Enjoy!