Philosophical Perspectives on Form in Design

This event juxtaposes multiple philosophical perspectives to set the stage for discussion and conversation on the nature of form. While “form (ever) follows function” was advocated as the single law* by the American architect Louis Sullivan, and has been a dominate dictum of modern design. Another expression, devised by the philosopher G. Spencer-Brown and published as the "Laws of Form,” was hailed as a new calculus by Bertrand Russell.

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Professor Iannilli, a Philosopher of Aesthetics at the University of Bologna, brings these abstract yet fundamental laws to ground in her talk on aesthetics in everyday life. Philosophical aesthetics has only recently recognized design as an aesthetically relevant phenomenon and therefore worthy of analysis. This shift is due to a growing awareness on the part of the discipline that, in general terms, is linked to an urgency to focus on the concrete, operative, practical and material dimensions of experience understood in its sensible, perceptual and expressive (i.e., aesthetic) bearing. More specifically, this awareness concerns a) the acknowledgement that aesthetics runs on a spectrum spanning artistic and extra-artistic aspects; b) the fact that while being a theory, it fundamentally relies on practices in which it is rooted and which constitute its test-bed; and c) an increasingly anti-dualistic approach to phenomena which aims to overcome dichotomies such as theory-practice, passivity-activity, mind-body, organism-environment, beauty-usefulness, nature-artifice, extraordinariness-ordinariness and form-function, to name a few.

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In this framework, design, meant as a crucial conceptual device, proved itself capable of affording a discipline such as philosophical aesthetics the opportunity to radically reconsider and renew itself in the light of a pervasive and complex phenomenon which concretely affects everyday life. But can philosophical aesthetics be equally fruitful for design practice? In this presentation, Felde and Iannilli offer a possible model for an aesthetics of design relying on contributions spanning pragmatist and everyday aesthetics. Mathematician Simon Treille joins them to introduce “Laws of Form” by G. Spencer-Brown and the work of the topologist Lou Kauffman into their philosophical discourse.

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“It is the pervading law of all things organic and inorganic, of all things physical and metaphysical, of all things human and all things superhuman, of all true manifestations of the head, of the heart, of the soul, that the life is recognizable in its expression, that form ever follows function. This is the law.” – Louis Sullivan