Form or Function?... Function or Form??

The million-dollar question: “ is form more or less important than function?” As an art student I have been sitting with this question since my 8^th grade art teacher asked me to design a tea set who’s form trumped its function. While explaining the assignment, a wire-headed and overtly eccentric, Mrs. Eskin said, “Make me a pretty tea pot, it doesn’t have to work, but it should look good.” At the time my peewee 8^th grader brain couldn’t understand why someone would want something that didn’t work, but I made the stinking teapot anyway. Earth, wind, and fire was my theme; I had fire cups, snow lids, and windy spouts, but my cups leaked water like rivers and the ceramic pot couldn’t withstand the fire of a stove. Not to mention that it was delicate. No use ever came of that tea set. Hence, after a few years of occupying space in my parents’ “look at our daughter” shrine, my mother promptly retired the pot to the basement and “accidentally” broke the biggest piece. Basically whether form was more important than function and vice versa depended on the perspective of the person in question. In Mrs. Eskin’s eyes the form was the winner, but my mother would have enjoyed a working teapot much more than one that she could just look at.

This historical antidote brings me to the following point: whether or not “form is more or less important than function,” is entirely dependant the object’s intended purpose. If an object’s function is decorative (such as a painting), its form will be more important than its function because, in essence the success of its function is directly related to the aesthetic value of its form. Since the use of the object is derived from a consumer enjoying its “form.” If an object is performance based (meaning that the object was purchased in order to help a person accomplish a task such as the qwerty keyboard) than certainly its function comes before its form. The person using the object is more concerned with using the object to complete a task than he is to enjoy looking at it.

Here are a few examples of my theory put into context. If a keyboard has a nifty look but doesn’t work, ultimately the consumer will return it, or chuck it out of the nearest window. While if a person bought a painting they would only expect to derive joy from gazing upon it. Most likely, but not always they would not expect it jump off of the wall and serve them cucumber sandwiches. So my point is that form over function, and function over form, are two interchangeable preferences that are based off of the object in question and what that object was meant to “do.”

Maren Epstein