Poll: Poll: Form or Function

[Orange12345]

A few days ago my car got a couple scratches on it, (I'll spare the details) after a few seconds of looking at it I just said "whatever" and kept about my business. A little later in the day I began to wonder why I wasn't mad about it, I know people who would lose their shit if it had happened to them. I came to the conclusion that the reason I wasn't mad was because the car still worked fine it just had a couple of scratches on it, no big deal.

Anyway I've decided to make a poll about this to see what the general consensus is.

Do you care what something looks like as long as it works well?

Or

Do you care if something is a little obtuse to use but as long as it looks good it's fine?

 

[Colour Scientist]

I obviously prefer things that look good and work well but if I had to choose I'd want something that did what it was supposed to do.

My I-pod is completely bent out of shape but it works fine so I still love it. I'd rather a shitty looking car that got me from A to B to a nice looking one that couldn't get out of the driveway. Having said that, if the aesthetic problem was fixable I would probably get it fixed straight away.

 

[DoPo]

I prefer function over prettyness. I prefer the thing I'm using to not look like garbage but that's about it - if it works and does it satisfactory, it's OK. I still carry my watch who is going to get a decade old very soon (I know I bought it in the beginning of March) and I'm have no plans to change it any time soon. And the watch is nothing fancy either, it just does what I want it to do, if I buy a new one, I think I'll only waste money. I still have some clothes that I wear at home that are a couple of years old but they are at least warm and comfortable. My last phone was about 2.5 years old or so when I changed it and I did it because some of the buttons stopped working. I still used if as an MP3 player for a while afterwards, though.

So yeah, as long as my things do what they should do, I'm perfectly happy. I might not try to use some in public, if they look really bad (say old clothes), but something like minor scratches aren't really an issue.

 

[Aidinthel]

Not only do I prefer function, but I want the form to emphasize that function. To me, the most beautiful things are those that are very useful and practical, without any superfluous decoration. In that light, a reasonable amount of superficial damage actually makes stuff look better to me, because it shows the thing is being used.

 

[Ieyke]

It depends on exactly how important the function is vs how much I have to have it sitting around where I have to look at it, how important the form is to the function being meaningful (a functional action figure that has been melted out of recognizable form but nonetheless retains 100 points of articulation is somewhat missing the point of the action figure in the first place, for example), and a dozen other variations on how important the form and function actually are in various circumstances.

I'll take a solid gold ornamental sword over a steel sword. Where swords are concerned, functionality is of very little consequence in the modern world.

I'll take a computer that looks like a train wreck if it happens to be a supercomputer.


Everything depends on the details.

 

[Thaluikhain]

Generally, function.

I HATE the idea that a new version of an old thing has to look New! and High-Tech! at the expense of being as easy to use as the old version.