Chairs

During my short career as a designer I have always been weary of functionalism as a design philosophy yet when I design I find myself consciously following the functionalist principles. I believe that the functionalist principles are good to take into account while designing as they are very practical and will lead to products that work but I have been weary of them because when I hear functionalism I just think of boring generic products that have been pared down to their essentials and are void of any cultural reference. The history of the rise of functionalist principles is interesting because it was a way of designing products to combat the amount of neo-classically influenced crap that was being produced in the 19th century. Yet as time progressed and the functionalist principles were adopted as the norm for designing something was lost, culture. With every functionalist object existing only to perform a task and with an aesthetic to match you start to see objects starting to all look the same, this phenomenon is similar to the rise of the international style in architecture. With the perfection of mass-production more and more of the same objects are being produced with nothing unique of special about them. We can see that although the functionalist principles were created with the best of intentions the result is that functionalist designs have become what they were created to combat. I believe the big thing that the functionalist manifesto is lacking is the recognition of culture as an important part of product design. We can see a resurgence of cultural references in product design within the past 15 years as a way of feeding our desire to experience something other than the sterile styling of functionalist design.