When I was younger teaching a course on Systems and Analysis and Design course, I would always make fun of the artists down the hall way that were teaching digital photography, animation, and other multimedia. They would also use the post modern concepts the function should follow form because otherwise you end up with architectural styles of large grey boring buildings. They extended this into the art forms, indicating that you must first conceive the form something will take, then you may consider how it may be used. Create the beauty and the use will follow. I scoffed at this, and rather openly.
I was of the mind set that if something does not make business sense, then it does not make cents. You must first have a function, built to that, and then eventually you could consider the form it will ultimately take. Art in my mind, was only valuable as a by product of functionality. Functional art in my mind would be the pinnacle of this harmonious concept. In a software development scheme, I felt that you must first understand the business function before you can consider the form it takes. A good example, would be a GUI interface that someone develops to look really pretty, but at the end of the day has no functionality behind it. I could see many interfaces fail completely because functionality was only a minor consideration in the development cycle. The most famous example is the original google search screen. Completely functional, very little fanfare. The form it took was as basic as it gets, the functionality obvious.
I imagine, like with all things, there is a balance between form and function that must be reached for something to be truly successful. So to make an extreme statement that form always follows function is folly, however, that is the way that I truly believed. How utilitarian of me. I am Peter Keating. You see, I had the perspective of a traditional waterfall software development mindset. You capture the requirements of a client, you determine what the functions of the business need to be, then you create the form. This sounds great on paper, and believe me, I have read a lot of paper on this topic.
However, real life, working with humans this does not actually flow in this manner. People need to have form before they are ever effective. This is why there has been such a shift left campaign going on in software development circles. We need to encourage more conversation rather than contracts. We need more prototypes earlier in the process so that we can experience failure before we spend too much money. We need to build fast and fail fast. What we need to focus on is the form, or how we do it, and less about what we are actually producing. The attitude is this, if you have good form you will produce something awesome even if you do not quite know what that is yet.
This flies in the face of the architecture is king mentality. The concept that we come up with the design, the functional flow diagram and then we produce software to fit. The concept now is that iterations are the process by which we accidentally run into something that works rather than the giant unveiling of a finished product at the end of a contract. The older that I have got the more this actually makes sense to me. I see it in the companies that I see that are success. We can go back a long way to see this trend, Henry Ford being a great example.
Sure, Ford built cars. He knew what he wanted to build, but his process of getting there was a series of rapid prototypes. The Model T was a long progression in his back yard of pieces of scrap metal and parts. I will not get into it, but there is an interesting history there as he tried to get this into a minimum viable product. However, once he had the concept he started working on the form. He created a process for developing cards rapidly and at lower cost. So what was the success here? The functional creation of a vehicle or the creation of the assembly line for mass producing vehicles? I daresay, that Ford became the company they are today because the process they created to develop the car is what they become good at not the actual car itself. How many times does this happen? HP sold the audio oscillator to Disney, but that was not the point. Hewlett and Packard created a company that was good and producing technology products. Isn’t this how success always happens? You start out trying to do something (the function) and you create a process to do it (the form) and by the time you are done it is the form that actually brings you the success. The thing you created was just the by product. Microsoft’s first software (function) was horrible, but they became good at creating software (the form). For years the entire industry copied the way they wrote software and how they organized their teams to do so.
So the form may or may not have preceded the function in these instances but it is absolutely more important. I like to think about the young Mozart. Everyone thinks of him as the childhood prodigy, the instant genius. However, was that reality? I think he had to learn how to play the piano really good first (the form). Even Mozart had to learn his scales. He had to take lessons. He copied others before he ever composed. So if you think about form from the perspective of the proper mechanic, the correct way of doing something then it is imperative. In this case, form must and absolutely be required for function to ever occur.
I think about my running experience. Sure, the function of running was something that I really wanted. Improved health and all associated benefits. However, was that function every even close to achievable without the form? I had to just start running, repeat over and over again until the mechanics started to work out. Now the form is falling into place, I can really start so see the functional benefit and more importantly actually be a runner now. Somethings you just have to do, practice and become before they will ever be functional for you.
So the repeated practice, the process of doing something is more important than any end result that you can dream up. Maybe it is important to have some directional idea, but whatever you start working towards the form that you create to improve will take you in a completely different direction than you intended in the first place. When you focus on the form first, you become capable of producing results and potentially in an area you never thought conceivable when you first started. So bottom line, focus on something, get better at it, improve the process and the very effort of creating good form will lead toward a functional result. Sounds backwards, but I do not think it is. It is just human.
Guy Reams
