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No Comments Written by Robert on June 6, 2008 – 7:51 pm

Designers create objects that are used by people or, in other words, are simply needed. (When you need a streetcar ticket to visit a friend, you use a vending machine to purchase it). Use has both an inner motivational aspect (Need) and an external one when it comes to practical applications. When something can be described as being in use it can also mean that one normally uses it or completes it, when in the context of a form of practical activity.

The purpose of design is to produce an object or system to be used by a user. This applies to both product and communication design. The designer can create or encode (to use a semiotic term) objects with regard to one or more uses. This can be called monofunctional or polyfunctional design, and can be illustrated by using interior space as an example.

A student’s room is a typical example of polyfunctional design. Work, recreation, sleep, dressing, personal hygiene, cooking, eating, and so on, all take place in the one room. At the other extreme would be an English country house built in the second half of the nineteenth century.

It was common at that time to assign a single function to each room, and then to furnish it optimally for this one function. So the dressing room was separate from the bedroom; there was a smoking room, a library, and a salon in which to receive guests with a separate dining room for most meals as well as a separate breakfast room. Each child had their own bedroom, playroom, and a room for private instruction and homework. This division by function continued in the garden: you could enter the rose garden or park from the salon and there was a kitchen garden with herbs that belonged to the domestic wing.

Forgetting for a moment that only this very small group, the aristocracy, and a small number of the newly wealthy bourgeoisie, could afford such a country house, which would have been impossible to manage without a large and diverse staff, examples like this marked the birth of the monofunctional design doctrine, that is that “form follows function.” In the twentieth century, Le Corbusier applied this model, which at first only involved a room’s functions, to the architectural components of an entire house, and then to urban planning.

Subsequently, an internal house wall supported by a steel frame no longer had the function of supporting the ceiling or the weight of the upper stories. According to Le Corbusier, its massive quality should not even pretend to perform this function, and it did not even have to extend to the ceiling. This wall has one function only, that is, to separate rooms (and hence, the rooms’ separate functions). Monofunctional design’s fundamental rule, that is to separate functions, was often ignored.

Yet, without this, the aphorism “form follows function” makes no sense. Le Corbusier’s urban planning philosophy illustrates precisely how breaking down functions can lead to problems. Le Corbusier was an advocate of the rigid separation of functions residential, work, recreational, and traffic. The first three functions were each allocated its own city zone, which was then equipped to fulfill that area’s functional requirements as well as possible. The traffic system had the task of connecting the above three zones.

Many cities in postwar Germany and elsewhere were restructured according to these criteria. What Le Corbusier intended to be humane, civilized and democratic soon turned into the desolate high-rise ghettoes on the edges of the city, to which residents only traveled at the end of the day to sleep. Work was shifted to industrial areas, the bleak local recreation areas with jogging paths were vacant, and inner cities were reduced to shopping malls and offices which, after closing time, became ghost towns.

The quality of urban life deteriorated as the resultant commuter society led to traffic jams and noise pollution that greatly deteriorated the quality of urban life. When architects and designers talk today about the need to reclaim cities, to repopulate and energize them, they are advocating a strategy to correct monofunctional urban planning schemes by reallocating more functions to different urban areas. This discourse, around the issues of reurbanization, was initiated in the 1960s by Jane Jacobs (1916–2006) in New York.

Designers, of course, have to analyze the particular circumstances of a project before deciding on whether a monofunctional or polyfunctional design will be appropriate. Although, by definition, the term use belongs to the user, the focus up until now has been on the aspect of design, that is, on product design.

It is interesting that when actually using a designed object, users often develop a different use than that originally intended by the designer (Non Intentional Design), whether the designer’s initial intention was monofunctional or polyfunctional. Jimi Hendrix played his guitar with his mouth, particularly his teeth and tongue, and then smashed it presumably not the original, intended use of the stringed instrument. Examples of unplanned uses of designed objects include chairs used as hangers for clothing, newspapers used to chase away annoying mosquitoes, books used to prop up projectors, and Galileo using the tower at Pisa for physics experiments.

The reception of or, semiotically speaking, the decoding of design products allows the user to contribute creatively to the actual use of a designed object. In principle, the handling of an object is always available for new uses. Uta Brandes and Michael Erlhoff called this phenomenon “non intentional design.”

This also applies to forms of secondhand use and recycling. The use of secondhand products also addresses the issue of conservation, because it keeps design objects in circulation and use for longer. A growing market for used goods is available for those who cannot afford or do not wish to buy new products. Not only are flea markets flourishing but eBay is also responsible for a huge and continuing growth in this market sector.

Objects are often kept precisely because they can be reused. Art historians and archaeologists use the term “spoils” (from the Latin, spoliare, meaning to plunder) for the remains of old or dilapidated buildings that are used to construct new buildings. Some Roman gravestones survived because they were used to build Romanesque churches in the Middle Ages. The industrial Ruhr area of Germany provides a more contemporary example of conservation through reuse. After the decline of coal mining and steel manufacturing, many old, dilapidated buildings survived because they were converted into new museums, government offices, and other public buildings.

The use of objects leaves traces, which can have a fetishizing or defetishizing effect (Patina). If you own an original, 1925 Wassily chair by Marcel Breuer, and use it regularly, the evident signs of use will have a defetishizing effect. The chair will no longer be an almost sacred design icon, an object to be revered when it is placed on view. It is secularized through use. However, if you had one of Marcel Breuer’s own chairs, one he owned and used throughout his life, the chair would gain immense value in the eyes of the viewer precisely because of the signs of use, because they are Marcel Breuer’s, that is, it would be esteemed as The Master’s Chair.

Living means leaving traces, wrote the German Marxist literary critic and philosopher, Walter Benjamin (1892–1940), who pointed out the practical difficulty of inhabiting modern interiors made of smooth, hard materials. He considered it the painful but unavoidable price to be paid for the progress and disenchantment that led the bourgeoisie to abandon the years of Bismarck and Kaiser Wilhem I, 1871–1914 (the Gründerzeit literally the foundation years) with its dark upholstered caves, for the bright and shining “machines for living” (Le Corbusier’s phrase) of modernism and their rational “respectable austerity.” Today’s return from aura to anti-aura design might suggest that the process of disenchantment has stalled.