In design, putting ‘decoration’ on a product that has no other function than changing the appearance (’because it looks nice’), is often considered bad practice, or at least it is in danger of being so. Form follows function - and if it doesn’t, you better have a very good story to tell why.
In the design of digital systems, there is in principle no way that form can follow function because the functionalities simply have no form (other than bits being changed on a chip, but even that can have an innumerable amount of different forms just to create one and the same digital operation). The separation of form and function has been one of the pillars of the functionalist thesis in cognitive science: the physical implementation of a (cognitive) function can in principle have any particular form - and so the physical form is not what is important about understanding cognitive functions. For example, we can do arithmatic with pencil and paper, by hart, with a mechanical calculator, a microchip, or even with a complicated kind of mill. If we put that to the extreme, claiming that only human biological brains can be truly ‘intelligent’ is considered antropo-chauvinism: it excludes the possibility that the same ‘functions’ could be implemented in intelligent extra-terrestial Martian gass-clouds as well. (Or in human-built machines, for that matter).
Now when you design a digital photocamera the controls can in principle have any form you like, because the functions you attach to the controls are digital instead of mechanical. In old-fashioned mechanical camera’s, at least some controls reflected the mechanical operation that they controlled (zooming meant you had to change the distance of the lenses which was done right on the lense box itself, and going from one picture to the next meant you had to scroll the film over some distance, which you did with a hook attached to the scroll-wheel. The mappings between the controls and the functions were al ‘real’, executed as ‘real’ physical movements in time-space, not just digital metaphors implemented as flip-flops on a microchip. (Again, to press the point, the flip-flops in the end are of course implemented as real physical effects, i.e. changes in voltage in the microchip, but there is no fixed relation between what physically happens in the chip and the functional effect it has in the digital system. In some sense the *form* of the voltage changes contain no intrinsic meaning, it is not the *form* of the flip-flops that determines what a particular flip-flop *refers* to (what it ‘means’) - that relation is designed and arbitrary, we have fix on one particular table of relations in order to make the system actually work, but we could have designed another table of relations for creating exactly the same ‘meanings’).
Tangible interaction is interesting because it tries to return to these direct and intuitive mappings between the control (what the user does) and the function (what effect it has in the machine). But of course, since it is really all digital computing inside, tangible interaction is still in danger of being ‘just appearance’. What are the right ‘tangible mappings’ and how to decide on that? Suppose we make a hook on the right top corner of a digital camera and if you turn the hook this will ‘mean’ that you switch from a previously taken photograph to an open screen, camera ready, for taking another one? Would this be ‘good’ design? I don’t know. I guess it would be ‘too easy’, too ‘banal’ in some sense, to do that. So acknowledging that it has some intrinsic quality to return to a ‘form follows function’ kind of design doesn’t directly help you in getting it right, tangible interaction needs its own language and best practices. (Of which I have seen many wonderful examples at TU/e)
I was thinking of one other aspect that I haven’t read about a lot in discussions on tangible interaction. This is the fact that not only are the digital functions ‘without form’, also many of the ‘primary functions’ of the modern technologies we create are without form. With ‘primary functionality’ is meant the main function the product has for the user. So although there are many digital functions in a digital camera (zooming, taking the photo, storing it, changing the lighting etc..) all these technical functions serve the primary function of enabling a person to make photo’s.
However, there are many ‘activities’ that are not so easily defined as ‘making a photo’. Many activities in our daily, Western lives are ‘thinking’ activities. Say you want to design a tool that enables you to ‘be more creative’, to ‘think more precise’, to ‘get to the core of a problem’, to ’save important bits of information’, to ‘learn from experiences’, etc…
Now I am definitely not a ‘functionalist’ in the sense I defined above. Embodied cognition is basically the anti-thesis of functionalism in cognitive science: it states that the physical forms matter, in fact, the physical forms of the body (including brain activity, but also the body proper), the world, and the dynamic patterns of our body as it is acting in that world, are the fundamental grounding of cognition. What you think is *specifically* determined by, and dependent on, those forms, not ‘designed’ on the basis of some computational table of relations that ‘implements’ abstract functions in an (arbitrary) physical format. If you think a particular thought, it would not be possible to design another system, with another physical form, that ‘thinks exactly the same thought’. This also means that you and I can never ‘think the same thought’. We can agree on the meaning of a word in a language (let’s both think of a banana!) but what we actually think when we decide to think of a banana is never the same for you and me.
No I am not presenting the full argument (don’t know if I could), but just let us assume that this is the case.
Then how would you design a modern, digital technological device, that should support “thinking” in general?
Perhaps that design question is the wrong question to ask. “Thinking” is not something like “taking a photograph”. You can “think about taking a photograph”, and that would be most easy to do if you have a photo-camera in hand. But you can also think about “Sailing” and that would be more easy if you actually sit in a sailboat, and holding a photocamera would only get in the way. So it seems that, in any case in the naive sense of ‘thinking’, there is no form that connects a product to ‘thinking’ as a general function of human life, since any particular thought is supported by different, particular forms. Thinking is best supported *using* the very things that we care to think *about*.Or saying it another way: thinking doesn’t happen in the void, it is always part of a particular activity involving particular objects and structures in the real world. Thinking doesn’t exist, only ‘thinking about X while doing Y’ does. And the physical forms that are relevant here are the forms of X and Y, not some abstract ‘form of thought’.
So although embodied cognition is antithetical to functionalism, in the end, for the designer, they both have the same problem: there doesn’t seem to be any easy, reliable relation between ‘a thought’ and ‘the physical world’ that you can work with, while it is these kinds of relations (like the hook and the film-scroll-function) that you would want to have in order to guide your design.
The only way, I guess, is to create a system where the particular form of the interface is completely arbitrary - and doesn’t get in the way- and behind this arbitrary form is a flexible ‘world’ where one can create ones own personal set of ‘thinking tools’. This world might be either digital or physical, as long as the world is large and flexible enough such that everybody can create a ’sub-world’ that fits his own particular purposes.
One such ‘product’ is the world itself!
The digital world of the internet is another such world perhaps, although the interface to it definetely gets in the way and it is the question whether the internet can be seen as a full-blown world or still only as a metaphorical model of it.
Here my thoughts stop (or my world ends) … to be continued
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