Article

Form is function

Author:

Bo WesterlundAuthors Info & Claims

DIS '02: Proceedings of the 4th conference on Designing interactive systems: processes, practices, methods, and techniques

Pages 117 - 124

https://doi.org/10.1145/778712.778731

Published: 25 June 2002 Publication History

Abstract

It's said that the Finnish architect Alvar Aalto designed a concert hall foyer in such a way that people when walking across the foyer towards the concert hall would not have to interrupt the conversations they were involved in. They would not need to find and interpret signs or difficult room forms in order to find their way. Aalto put a light shaft at the end of the foyer. People walked towards the light and having done that found themselves just above the stairs to the concert hall. [Ejhed, personal communication]So one function of the foyer is that it does not interrupt ongoing conversations. This function is not visible in itself but it depends on the real, visible forms. Form as function. What is interesting in this example is that the environment supports human behaviour. We can act without paying that much attention to what we do.

References

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Ejhed, Jan, professor and architect. Personal communication.

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Cited By

Bogdan C(2022)Affordance-Derived Declarative Interaction Models for Context AdaptationSense, Feel, Design10.1007/978-3-030-98388-8_16(174-182)Online publication date: 20-Mar-2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98388-8_16
Bouraqadi NStinckwich SDemeyer SPerrot J(2007)Bridging the gap between morphic visual programming and smalltalk codeProceedings of the 2007 international conference on Dynamic languages: in conjunction with the 15th International Smalltalk Joint Conference 200710.1145/1352678.1352685(101-120)Online publication date: 25-Aug-2007
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1352678.1352685

Index Terms

Form is function
1. Computing methodologies
  1. Artificial intelligence
    1. Philosophical/theoretical foundations of artificial intelligence
      1. Cognitive science
2. Human-centered computing
  1. Human computer interaction (HCI)

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Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

DIS '02: Proceedings of the 4th conference on Designing interactive systems: processes, practices, methods, and techniques

June 2002

413 pages

ISBN:1581135157

DOI:10.1145/778712

Conference Chairs:
Bill Verplank
Stanford University
,
Alistair Sutcliffe
UMIST
,
Program Chairs:
Wendy Mackay
I.N.R.I.A
,
Jonathan Amowitz
PeopleSoft
,
William Gaver
Royal College of Art

Copyright © 2002 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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SIGCHI: ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 25 June 2002

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DIS02: Designing Interactive Systems 2002

June 25 - 28, 2002

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DIS '02 Paper Acceptance Rate 44 of 139 submissions, 32%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 1,158 of 4,684 submissions, 25%

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Cited By

Bogdan C(2022)Affordance-Derived Declarative Interaction Models for Context AdaptationSense, Feel, Design10.1007/978-3-030-98388-8_16(174-182)Online publication date: 20-Mar-2022
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-98388-8_16
Bouraqadi NStinckwich SDemeyer SPerrot J(2007)Bridging the gap between morphic visual programming and smalltalk codeProceedings of the 2007 international conference on Dynamic languages: in conjunction with the 15th International Smalltalk Joint Conference 200710.1145/1352678.1352685(101-120)Online publication date: 25-Aug-2007
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1352678.1352685

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