Reconsidering the Form

and Function Relationship

in Artificial Objects
Anthony Crabbe

Louis H. Sullivan, The Tall Office

Building Artistically Considered,
(Lippincotts Monthly Magazine, March,
1896: 403-09). Copied at http://archive.
org/details/tallofficebuildi00sull
(accessed August 29, 2011).
David P. Billington, The Tower and
the Bridge: The New Art of Structural
Engineering (Princeton, NJ: University
of Princeton Press, 1985), 105-06.
Le Corbusier, The Radiant City:
Elements of a Doctrine of Urbanism
to Be Used as the Basis of Our
Machine-Age Civilization, trans P. Knight,
E. Levieux and D. Coltman (New York:
The Orion Press, 1964).

doi:10.1162/DESI_a_00226

Introduction
In an era when many designers are investigating new uses for
expired or obsolete products, we should reconsider the usefulness
of the modernist design mantra coined by Louis Sullivan in
1896: It is the pervading law of all things organic and inorganic
that form ever follows function.1 That Sullivans assertion was
so quickly accepted as law-like appears surprising today, given
the abundant historical evidence that designers often innovate
artifacts and systems by adapting some pre-existent form to a new
function. As a pioneer of high-rise architectural design, Sullivan
himself provides a case in point. His own design specialization
was made possible only when the architect, with whom Sullivan
served his apprenticeship, William LeBaron Jenney, adapted a
system of building steel box girder bridges on American railroads
to the demands of constructing multi-story frame buildings in
booming but geographically constrained cities like Chicago. 2
Sullivans law could then be seen to invoke something of a
chicken and egg dilemma about whether the design process has
only one causal direction: choose a new desired function g find
the form to perform it, which precludes the opposing direction:
choose an existing form g find a new function it can perform. This
paper aims to discover whether the dilemma is genuine or spurious by means of historical review and critical analysis of selected
artifacts, both ancient and modern.
Biological Analogy
Sullivan claims his design law to be evident in natural organisms, as well as in artifacts. Appeals to natural law are a familiar
feature of modernist design theory, as evidenced in Le Corbusiers
justifications for the hierarchies he designed into the Radiant City. 3
Yet drawing analogies between nature and design inevitably
draws one discipline into the controversies of the other, as can be
illustrated by the controversy in evolutionary theory over the
giraffes long neck. Standard Darwinian explanations seek to identify some function of the long neck that was favored by natural
selection, for examplefeeding from high vegetation, or winning
2013 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
DesignIssues: Volume 29, Number 4 Autumn 2013

Robert E. Simmons & Lue Scheepers,

Winning a Neck: Sexual Selection in the
Evolution of the Giraffe, The American
Naturalist 148 (1996): 771-78.
Stephen Jay Gould, The Tallest Tale,
Natural History 105, no. 5 (1996): 18-23.
Wolf-Ekkard Lnnig The Evolution of
the Long-Necked Giraffe, (2006),
www.weloennig.de/Giraffe.pdf
(accessed February 17, 2012).

5
6

the neck-slapping contests in which male giraffes compete for

females.4 However, Stephen Jay Gould argues that these are just
two of many useful functions served by the giraffes neck. Since
natural selection is not theorized to be a mechanism that favors a
plurality of functions, adherents of Darwinism must be inclined to
think that many of the functions of the giraffes longer neck are
simply ones that have developed to exploit the advantages of that
particular form.5 Furthermore, paleontologists have never found
an intermediary species between the earliest known giraffes
(which have necks as long as modern ones) and their theorized
short-necked okapi ancestors. Accordingly, Gould argues that
these gaps in knowledge make arguments about which function
was favored by natural selection too speculative, increasing the
risk that scientists attribute to nature the selection of a function
that they themselves actually selected.

Debates over which function best explains the evolution of
natural forms can also elicit challenges against the best-established
evolutionary theories. Wolf-Ekkard Lnnig argues that the absence
of an intermediary, longer-necked ancestral giraffe invites a reconsideration of the Darwinian view that evolution comprises an
incremental series of micro stages in which natural selection progressively favors certain variants of a particular gene, such as the
one controlling the development of neck vertebrae.6 Lnnig points
out that a whole concert of gene variations is required to enable the
elongation of the giraffes neck, including ones to raise blood pressure and ones to form specialized valves in the jugular vein that
prevent premature return of the blood.

Likewise, we find that many mechanical apparatuses
appearing to perform only one function are often components of a
much larger complex, designed to perform yet other functions.
Modifying one feature of the complex, such as choosing much bigger road wheels for a car, then requires not only a redesign of the
existing wheels, but also substantial redesign of the suspension,
steering, brakes, transmission, and so forth.

Another interesting feature of Lnnigs argument is that he,
too, draws an analogy between artifacts and organisms by showing an illustration of parallel versions of different cutlery items
arranged into a sequence that falsely suggests some are the ancestors of others. Because we have a history of artifacts that have been
designed by known creators, we might imagine that this archaeological issue is not particularly relevant to design history and theory. However, in tracing the evolution of a particular product
like the mobile phone, we see that the drivers of its evolution are
not simply physical factors, but also human ones. In physical
terms, we see that the first mobile telephones like the Motorola
GSM, evolved from radio-signaling devices controlled by basic
computer components, into mobile computers, such as IPhones and

DesignIssues: Volume 29, Number 4 Autumn 2013

Charles Darwin (1859) On the Origin of

Species by Means of Natural Selection,
or the Preservation of Favoured Races in
the Struggle for Life (Cambridge Library
Collection, 2007), 95-96.

Androids that incorporate radio-signaling components. Because

the later smart phones have descended not only from the GSM,
but also from larger networked computers running on UNIX and
Linux operating systems, respectively, the temptation is to view
smart phones as hybrid radio-computers.

However, this analogy does not work well, because natural
hybrids, such as mules, are sterile, whereas smart phone technology presently appears highly fertile, (e.g., smart phones in the
Samsung Galaxy series are presently growing into larger tablet
size portable computers). The evolution of smart phones might
better be characterized as the result of a convergence of components borrowed from both computer and communication technologies, which have themselves started to converge in terms of both
components and systems. This notion of technological convergence
opposes the image of branches bifurcating from a common ancestral root in the tree of life metaphor, which Darwin famously
used to illustrate his evolutionary theory.7 This contradiction casts
doubt on the idea that the physical mechanisms underlying the
evolution of natural and artificial forms are truly analogous.

Given the human factors driving these technological developments, we need to consider why a mobile phone system originally marketed to business executives is developing into a
connected network of portable computers marketed to every sector
of society, worldwide. Explaining this transition solely in the physical terms of advances in electronic engineering would be very difficult. The mass consumer uptake of this technology appears
related to the new behaviors mobile phones enable, such as allowing people at meetings or gatherings to engage in parallel communication with others not present, via text messaging. Smart phones
offer users ever-increasing opportunities to work, play, or distract
themselves using a diverse array of personal tools of the kind used
on standard computers, without needing to be at a desk. Furthermore, the value of smart phones does not appear to depend solely
on their physical portability, but also on the number of apps they
can offer the user. Indeed, the degree of functionality offered by
the competing patent-protected technological platforms encourages many consumers to identify themselves in a factional way
with the proprietary brand namesMac, Android, and Blackberryeach offering competing apps running on different operating systems.

It is also tempting to characterize such market struggles in
Darwinian terms, with profitability cast in the role of natural
selector, but again, that appears to be a misleading analogy. Consider how Microsoft won a lions share of the revenue generated by
the personal computer (PC) system designed and developed by
IBM. Microsofts success did not come from designing and marketing a more competitive computer system. Instead, it came from

DesignIssues: Volume 29, Number 4 Autumn 2013

Figure 1
Carburettor
http://worldwide.espacenet.com/publicationDetails/mosaics?CC=GB&NR=189411119A&K
C=A&FT=D&ND=6&date=18940804&DB=EPO
DOC&locale=en_EP (accessed June 4, 2012).

IBM personal computer, http://

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_
Computer (accessed February 20, 2012).
9 Microsoft, http://en.wikipedia.org/
wiki/Microsoft (accessed February 20,
2012).
10 Paul Lazar, Donat Banki & John Csonka
A New or Improved Mixing Chamber
for Petroleum and similar Engines (UK
Patent 11,119, 1894).
8

IBMs carelessness in simultaneously opting for an open architecture hardware platform and failing to protect the copyright for the
software of its DOS operating system8a design and development
project that IBM had subcontracted to Microsoft to cut the lead
time to market.9 This strategic oversight gave Microsoft a head
start in designing its own proprietary range of software products,
which would profit most from the successful adoption of the IBM
PC system it had helped to design. Consequently, the market success of the PC system actually generated greater profits for other
hardware and software companies than for IBM due to an exceptional combination of marketing and licensing strategies that
helped to foster conflicting commercial loyalties among members
of IBMs PC design team. These examples illustrate that analogies
between the development of natural and artificial forms have considerable potential to corrupt an analysis of Sullivans law.
Unprecedented Forms
Sullivans notion of form following function appears more easily
illustrated by examples of engineering design. For example, consider the invention of the carburetoran unprecedented fuel-mixing and -dispensing device, specifically designed for early
automobile engines and still used in lightweight, two-stroke
engines. The inventive step claimed by Lazar et al.s 1894 patent,
illustrated in Figure 1, involved using the intake stroke of a combustion engine to draw air through a converging-diverging tube,
and thereby to entrain and mix into the air flow volatile spirits
held in a separate reservoir.10 In accordance with Sullivans law,

DesignIssues: Volume 29, Number 4 Autumn 2013

11 Giovanni Battista Venturi, Encyclopedia

Britannica, www.britannica.com/
EBchecked/topic/625623/GiovanniBattista-Venturi (accessed February 12,
2012).
12 Greg Monks, The History of The Cornet,
From Pre-History to the Present (2003)
www.blackdiamondbrass.com/tpthist/
trpthist.htm (accessed August 1, 2011).
13 Ascher H. Shapiro & K. R. Wadleigh,
The AerothermopressorA Device for
Improving the Performance of a Gas
Turbine Power Plant (U.S.A.: Defense
Technical Information Center, 1955)
Reproduced at WorldCat, www.worldcat.
org/title/final-summary-report-of-theaerothermopressor-project/oclc/
16016363 (accessed August 2, 2011).

only a converging-diverging tube can perform this particular

physical function, as had been demonstrated by the work of the
late eighteenth century physicist, Giovanni Battista Venturi, after
whom such tubes are now named.11 However, although Venturi
was the first to scientifically observe the physical effects of such
tubes on fluid flows, the effects had long been exploited in artifacts
such as trumpets, which were being made and used in Egypt in
the second millennium BCE.12 The entrainment and mixing
effects of a Venturi tube are used not only in carburetors, but
also in jet pumps free of moving internal parts, which are capable of transporting solid particles, as well as fluids. Wind tunnels
are essentially large Venturi tubes, into which a flow of air is
inducted through the tube by a powered fan at the outlet. The
Venturi effect is then a common feature of a number of complex
artifacts that have different overall forms and serve different functions, each requiring the incorporation of components unique to
their specific function. This multiplicity encourages the view that
the Venturi tube itself is just one member of an ensemble of
engineering components that includes cogs, bearings, valves, fans,
and so forth. By definition, component forms seldom constitute
stand-alone artifacts, and as evidenced by the Venturi tube of a
carburetor, they are generally hidden details within a more complex artifact having an entirely different form and function, such
as an automobile.

Even if we restrict our view only to those artifacts in which
the Venturi tube is the dominant form (e.g., a modern trumpet, a
wind tunnel, and a jet pump), we see that each artifact uses the
Venturi effect for different and non-interchangeable functions. The
width-to-length ratios in a trumpet make it useless for entraining
and mixing any secondary fluid stream, while the fan drawing air
into a wind tunnel would undermine the requirement of a jet
pump to place no moving parts in the path of the fluid stream that
it entrains. Hence, it is knowledge about the Venturi effect that
leads to the design of diverse artifacts, where each serves different functions as the result of incorporating a converging-diverging
tube form.

The differences between the intelligent and Darwinian
selection of physical forms may be further illustrated by the example of an unconventional application of the Venturi effect that does
not use a Venturi tube. The aerothermopressor was an experimental compressor developed by the U.S. military in the 1940s and
1950s, which actually injected water droplets against the flow of hot
exhaust gases from the combustion chamber of a jet engine, raising
their pressure before they entered the turbine stage of the engine.13
In other words, the design strategy adapted the expanding nozzle
of a combustion chamber into a secondary compression stage by
means of slowing the exhaust gases with a secondary flow of fluids injected upstream through a secondary converging nozzle.
DesignIssues: Volume 29, Number 4 Autumn 2013

Figure 2
Mace, central Europe, ca. 1500-1550.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/
File:Mace_IMG_3823.jpg (accessed
June 6, 2012).

Such adaptations of extant engineering forms to achieve secondary

mechanical effects do not appear to substantiate that form follows
function, but rather, to demonstrate that existing forms can suggest novel functions.

Knowing that two examples of the Venturi effect are hidden
components of complex products like cars and planes makes it
difficult to restrict our notion of their function merely to the physical. Beyond their physical function, cars and planes are for certain
people prized status symbols, and for others a menace. Any consideration, of the functions that are performed by such a complex
of intelligently designed forms, must then involve the intangible,
communicative functions as wellfunctions that I now discuss in
more detail.

14 Sergeant-at Arms, http://en.wikipedia.

org/wiki/Sergeant-at-Arms (accessed
December 20, 2011).
10

The Complex of Physical and Intangible Functions

It is hard to imagine an artifact more primitive than the club,
which is the common attribute of any cartoon caveman. By the
middle ages, warriors were better protected from the effects of
such weapons by skillfully designed plate armor that gave even
better protection to mounted knights than chain mail. In turn, this
stimulated the development of more effective clubs, known as
maces, which carried armor-piercing flanges and/or spikes (see
Figure 2). The intensive skilled labor required to forge and hammer these complex steel-edged clubs made them affordable only to
the elite class of mounted knights, who in a feudal society, held
their land and superior social status in return for contracted periods of military service to their lord.

In 1278, the expansionist Angevin king of England, Edward
I, formed the most dependable of his mounted knights into a 20
strong royal bodyguard known as the Sergeants-at-Arms.14 All or
most of these men appear to have been armed with the mace,
which had a number of advantages over the longsword in the kind
DesignIssues: Volume 29, Number 4 Autumn 2013

Figure 3
Drogheda Mace
Photograph: Kate Horgan

of close-quarter melee most threatening to the kings safety.

The stouter, heavier mace required a shorter swing that did not
need to be as skillfully aimed as a sword stroke, and since the
whole weight of the blow was concentrated over a small surface
area, the shock alone would be sufficient to inflict incapacitating
injuries, regardless of whether the armor was penetrated. The
mace, then, appears to be an excellent example of Sullivans law.
Yet what makes the sergeants mace particularly interesting is that
Edwards peacetime use of his trusted bodyguards gave rise to a
variant form of the mace that performed a very different function.

As the scion of a dynasty of kings who spent much of their
time campaigning in territories that stretched from Ireland to
Spain, Edward I had to perform much of his governance by proxy.
In particular, he used his formidable sergeants to collect loans and
levy taxes from people often likely to be reluctant donors. It then
became customary for the sergeants to signify to various regional
assemblies of people who might never have seen the king that they
had his authority to start the proceedings by entering the assembly
displaying items that made their identity and purpose clear. Preceding the sergeant was an attendant carrying the kind of ornamental longsword with which the monarch would dub chosen
followers as his knights. The sergeant himself bore the costly mace
of a royal bodyguarda signifier of authority that would also have
been useful for maintaining order in unruly assembliesanother
of the sergeants responsibilities, still held by British parliamentary
sergeants to this day.

In former British dependencies across the world, governmental assemblies continue to be opened and closed by such a
parade of sword and mace. As illustrated in Figure 3, the ceremonial versions of both weapons have evolved from vicious-looking
steel weapons into decorative regalia; the mace typically is fashioned from precious materials by silversmiths, rather than wrought
out of iron by blacksmiths. Having evolved into an opulent symbol
of the prosperity and prestige enjoyed by the civic assemblies that

DesignIssues: Volume 29, Number 4 Autumn 2013

11

Figure 4
Ian Swain Billhooks
enquiries@theluddite.com
http://www.theluddite.com/handtools.html
(accessed June 8, 2012).

Figure 5
English Bill
Wikicommons, http://commons.wikimedia.
org/wiki/File:English_Bill.jpg
(accessed June 6, 2012).

15 George Silver, Brief Instructions Upon

My Paradoxes of Defence (1559), Chapter 13. Reproduced at www.thearma.org/
Manuals/BriefInstruct.htm (accessed
February 20, 2012).
16 David Eltis, The Military Revolution in
Sixteenth-century Europe (London: I. B.
Tauris, 1998), 43-76.
12

owe their legitimacy to the absent authority, the ornamental mace,

with its crosses, orbs, and crowns, signify even more clearly both
the temporal and spiritual authority of a monarch.

The communicative functions of these ritualistic weapons
also raise questions about why the Angevin kings continued to
favor the mace and longsword as symbols of their authority, rather
than the characteristic weapons of the rank-and-file Englishmen
they drew into their continental armies. The distinctive weapons
of English medieval armies were the longbow and billhook (or
English bill). In the Hundred Years War, their combination proved
devastating to the elite knightly cavalry, which had been essential
to the battle tactics of medieval Western European armies. The billhook, illustrated in Figure 4, provides another example of an existing form adapted to serve a different function. In peacetime, it was
a coppicing and pruning tool for peasants who maintained the
hedgerows and orchards taken over by their Norman conquerors.
The continuing campaigns of these conquerors offered English
peasants one of the few opportunities to escape a life of agricultural servitude by presenting themselves as credible soldiers. By
mounting the pruning tool on a longer handle, they might show
themselves as armed with what was known to be an effective
weapon. In combat, the curved bill proved particularly useful
for hooking into the armor and clothing of opponents and dragging them to the ground, where in particular, an unhorsed knight
could be suppressed by anyone armed only with a knife that could
be inserted into gaps in the groin or helmet of a suit of armor.15

Ransom made suppressed knights far more valuable to
peasant soldiers than dead ones, but when necessary, the protruding bill was also well suited to piercing armor, and because it was
pole-mounted, the billhook could deliver a blow of even greater
force than could a knights mace. During the course of the Hundred
Years War, it required only rudimentary blacksmithing to modify
the original agricultural tool into a more specialized weapon by
means of cutting into the basic form and pulling away strips to
form additional spear-like points, and forks, which could be used
to catch and deflect opposing weapons (see Figure 5). These design
modifications provided most of the functions of the halberd, later
used by Swiss and German militia, whose pole-armed formations
finally brought the use of knightly cavalry to an end.16

A modified agricultural tool that enabled bands of peasant
volunteers to vanquish elite forces of feudal retainers might not
recommend itself to their lords as a suitable emblem of feudal
authority, even though it probably made a greater contribution
than the mace in physically asserting this authority. Comparing
the form of the bill to that of the mace is then likely to reveal differences between the medieval and the modern viewers interpretations of the messages that are communicated in continuing

DesignIssues: Volume 29, Number 4 Autumn 2013

picturesque rituals that involve ceremonial maces, including university graduation ceremonies. Knowledge of the maces origins
and significance might well strengthen the republican sentiment
in the minds of many modern viewers. Such variability in interpretation show how the intangible communicative functions these
objects perform can seldom be fixed for all times and places.

Whereas the mace provides an example of a form that
follows its physical function in the manner claimed by Sullivan,
whether the same can be said of the billhook is less clear. The bills
form performs similar physical functions in both agriculture and
battle: in agriculture, the bill hooks around springy shoots and
draws them onto the cutting blade, or when struck at logs, it helps
to split them. However, the pole handle of the billhook used in
orchards serves only to give reach to higher branches, whereas
manuals like that of George Silver make clear that in combat, the
pole is essential for parrying counter thrusts, tripping opponents,
and striking with the butt end in order to set up an attack with the
bill end. Therefore, regardless of any military modification to its
head, the pole-mounted bill does not serve the same physical functions in agriculture and in battle. Accordingly, this objects physical functions appear defined by its use in either contextin just
the manner discussed by Gould of the giraffe, the sexually
aroused bull giraffe might simply be finding another physical
function for his long neck, rather than using it for the function
favored by natural selection.

The development of the ornamental mace strongly suggests
that the military mace communicated a sense of prestige to medieval minds that the bill did not. Hence, even though the relationship between the physical form and the function of the mace
appears to evidence the causal direction implied by Sullivans
law, the same object came to serve an intangible function, which
led to the development of a variant form serving only a communicative purpose that was undoubtedly intended by its designers.
Yet despite these intentions, others may choose to interpret the
messages communicated in very different ways. The people of
Drogheda likely would not have viewed their towns English-style
mace, illustrated in Figure 3, in quite the way that members of the
English parliament did, given that Drogheda was the site of an
infamous massacre during Oliver Cromwells suppression of an
Irish rebellion in 1649. The fact that the (replacement) mace illustrated was donated by William III, to whose memory Northern
Irish Orange lodges are dedicated, makes the present Drogheda
Corporations decision to put it back on display controversial to
this day.17
17 Drogheda municipal art collection (2012),
www.highlanes.ie/Activity.aspx?Activity
ID=103 (accessed February 24, 2012).
DesignIssues: Volume 29, Number 4 Autumn 2013

13

Figure 6
Sarah Turner Ella lampshade
info@sarahturner.co.uk.

18 Gro H. Brundtland, Report of the

World Commission on Environment and
Development: Our Common Future (U.N.:
1987) www.un-documents.net/wced-ocf.
htm (accessed January 9, 2011).
19 G. Rebitzer, T. Ekvallb, R. Frischknecht,
et al., Life Cycle Assessment: Part 1:
Framework, Goal and Scope Definition,
Inventory Analysis, and Applications,
Environment International 305 (2004):
701-20.
20 Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel
(London: Vintage, 2005), 242-49.
14

Up-Cycled Products
Today, our production and consumption practices might appear to
pose an even greater threat to human survival than war. Designers
are responding by exploring both prospective and retrospective
design strategies to support the global project identified by the
United Nations in the 1980s as Sustainability.18 Prospective
design approaches, which often fall under the umbrella of responsible design, invite designers to conduct life-cycle analyses in
which they consider the wider implications of their choice of materials and manufacturing methods, as well as the social contexts in
which their designs will function.19 Such analyses then become
part of the feasibility study in which designers propose the best
way to implement their plans.

Retrospective design approaches are more closely allied to
recycling approaches, as evidenced in the umbrella term upcycling, where designers try to find new functions for expired
products (e.g., packaging, clothing, and car parts) that typically
accumulate as problem post-consumer wastes. Both the cost and
ecological effect of recycling these wastes back into bulk raw materials invite an alternative strategy of finding valuable new uses for
discarded artifactsa strategy that can be led by designers rather
than materials processing specialists.

Examples of up-cycled products include bottles transformed
into lampshades, tires into furniture, circuit boards into book
bindings, computer monitors into aquaria, and so forth. On the
face of it, then, the up-cycling strategy appears to evidence the
reverse of Sullivans law because the designer looks at the form of
the discarded objects and seeks some new physical function that
would make the object useful and valuable again. This approach
has affinities with Jared Diamonds arguments about necessitys
mother:20 He talks for example about a New Guinean, finding a
discarded yellow pencil and putting it to new use as a piece of
nasal jewelryan action that Diamond argues is characteristic of
the process by which many sophisticated inventions emerge. He
further argues that inventors often cannot foresee the principal
application of their inventions. For example, Edison intended his
phonograph to be used as an office machine and was dismayed to
find that its principal application turned out to be what he
regarded as the more trivial one of playing musical recordings.

As Diamonds examples again show, artifacts serve not only
physical, but also communicative functions, and the latter appear
particularly important in many up-cycled goods. Take for example,
two lighting fixtures, each designed and made from post-consumer waste. The Ella lampshade (see Figure 6) was made from

DesignIssues: Volume 29, Number 4 Autumn 2013

Figure 7
Caro Fontoura Alzaga, Chandelier
http://www.facaro.com/contactform.

21 www.sarahturner.co.uk (accessed August

7, 2011).
22 www.facaro.com (accessed August 7,
2011).
23 2011 profile of Sarah Turner at: www.
great-british-designs.co.uk/designers/
sarah-turner (accessed February 24,
2012).
24 Dore Ashton, ed., Picasso on Art: A
Selection of Views (London: Penguin,
1977), 157.

discarded soft drink bottles by Sarah Turner.21 The baroque-style

chandelier (see Figure 7) was made from worn out chain drives
and wheel rims by Carolina Fontoura Alzaga.22 Both of these handmade objects demonstrate their designers ingenuity and care in
putting discarded artifacts to entirely new physical uses. This
ingenuity naturally reinforces the consumers awareness of the
contribution that up-cycling has made in raising the value of postconsumer waste. As indicated by their price tags of hundreds of
dollars, these fixtures have a value comparable to that of other art
or craft products laboriously fashioned from clay, or paint on canvas. These fixtures cannot be viewed, then, solely as demonstrations of how donor waste products can be put to new physical use.
They are most likely to be viewed as demonstrations of individual
creative prowess. Publicity describes Turner, a product design
graduate, as an an award winning eco artist and designer.23

Hence, the context in which the work of Turner and Fontoura Alzaga might be described as demonstrating prowess is
one that also includes modernist art and design notions concerning the found object and constructivism. That context includes
Picassos well-known account of how a chance encounter with a
discarded bicycle when he was out walking with a friend led to the
1943 assembly, Bulls Head, which commemorates Picassos
observation that while his friend saw only handlebars and a saddle, as an artist, Picasso saw other possibilities.24 The constructive
approach evident in both light fixtures is also familiar from student exercises at the Bauhaus and the constructivist sculptures
produced by artist-engineers like Antoine Pevsner. The approach
involves taking industrial stock forms and joining them together
in some iterative way to create a beautiful new form that can be
admired as might the form generated by a natural, iterative process, such as that which forms the shell of the nautilus.

However, as this analogy might suggest, in any hierarchy of
products serving useful physical functions, a beautiful up-cycled
lampshade might not rank as highly as its original donor parts
because those parts offer the most cost-effective means for achieving their original functions, like distributing potable liquids or
connecting final drives to motors. The far higher cost of these light
fixtures thus reflects not only their labor costs, but also the premium set on their creators art and design skills. Such examples of
up-cycled design then appear to act more as communicative tokens
of responsible design than as products of an effective design
strategy for the mass recuperation of consumer waste. This is not
to say these works are ineffective in addressing the issues of consumer waste, since they could be viewed as prototypes produced
by a design approach that could eventually lead to designs that
make a more significant contribution to waste management. For

DesignIssues: Volume 29, Number 4 Autumn 2013

15

example, the less adventurous use of obsolete computer circuit

boards to make Filofax covers became a quite popular fad in the
2000s, and thus helped manage a larger volume of such waste.

These examples again reveal the complexities of the formfunction relationship. In terms of physical function, the up-cycled
light fixtures evidence a reversal of the causal direction implied by
form follows function. However, in terms of communicative
function, they appear to evidence Sullivans direction, given the
crucial caveat that consumers might choose to interpret what the
artifacts communicate differently than what was intended by their
makers, and that with time, these interpretations might change and
be supplemented by others. Moreover, the possibility always exists
that consumers also will use an up-cycled product differently than
intended, such as making it a water feature or a decorative pendulum. Although the historical record might not allow such alternative functions to be the source of the sort of controversy arising
over the giraffes neck, it would not necessarily prevent controversy
about whether the primary physical function of an artifact like
Edisons phonograph was any of those he intended by the designer,
or alternatively, the one for which it was most used.

25 Adolf Loos, Ornament and Crime,

(1910) Reprinted at www.gwu.edu/~art/
Temporary_SL/177/pdfs/Loos.pdf
(accessed March 12, 2011). See also:
Katie Nicole Moss, Constructing a
Modern Vienna: The Architecture and
Cultural Criticism of Adolf Loos, (University of Oregon: Masters Thesis, 2010),
3-4, https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/
xmlui/handle/1794/10690 (accessed
May 5, 2012).
26 Jan Michl, Form Follows What? The
Modernist Notion of Function as a Carte
Blanche1:50 Magazine No. 10, (Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, Haifa,
Israel: Winter, 1995), 20-31. Transcribed
at: janmichl.com/eng.fff-hai.html
(accessed February 29, 2012).
16

Conclusion
Sullivans own designs of high-rise buildings were distinguished
by their virtuoso decorations executed in costly materials, as on
the celebrated facades of Chicagos Carson Pirie Scott department
store of 1899. This commitment to applied ornamentation ran counter to the thinking of most of Sullivans modernist contemporaries,
who advocated that every function of a design, including its intangible ones, should be intrinsic to its form, as advocated by Adolf
Loos in his 1910 essay, Ornament and Crime, published 17 years
after he had visited the United States and been introduced to the
work of Chicago architects, including Sullivan. 25 The fact that
Sullivan found a place for ornamentation in his own design work
suggests that his notion of function was confined to physical utility, rather than any combination of utility with communicative
functions. However, the examples discussed reveal that it is very
difficult to dissociate the two senses of function in many artifacts,
even in complex engineering forms like cars and planes, since
these appear to communicate as eloquently as any classic Chicago
high-rise building. Hence, Sullivans appeal to natural law is not
persuasive because the intelligent processes leading to the development of artificial forms appear to have features not seen in the
biochemical processes theorized to drive the evolution of natural
forms. The consequences of designers failing to recognize these
differences are further discussed in Jan Michls critique of those
twentieth century functionalist architects who used Sullivans
dictum to legitimate their focus on formal details, and their disregard of the ordinary users values, needs, and desires.26
DesignIssues: Volume 29, Number 4 Autumn 2013