Functional Ornament Text

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Abstract I. Beyond Function II. From Object to Thing III. Ornament as Structure, Not Surplus IV. Ornament, Power, and the Politics of Taste V. Objects, Signs, and Instability VI. Functional Ornament as Practice VII. Conclusion

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Abstract

This thesis approaches ornament not as decorative excess, but as a functional condition through which objects mediate meaning, attachment, and use. In a context of material abundance and efficient production, function alone no longer explains why some objects endure while others are quickly discarded. Rather than treating ornament as surplus, the research considers it as a form of mediation embedded in making and everyday interaction.

Moving across object theory, design history, and critical accounts of modernity, the thesis traces how ornament was marginalised alongside craft through industrial rationalisation, colonial hierarchies of taste, and modernist ideals of reduction. It then considers ornament’s reappearance within postmodern and post-structural contexts, where objects operate simultaneously as tools, symbols, and points of connection.

The concept of functional ornament is proposed as a methodological lens and design practice. Illustrated through an archive of objects collected across diverse scales and contexts, they serve as witnesses to elaborate on

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the main ideas discussed in this thesis. Rather than opposing function, functional ornament expands it to include care, memory, and relational value, to better understand how objects remain meaningful within contemporary material culture.

Mo Tong Yang

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I. Beyond Function

I often find myself questioning what design offers to society today beyond its ability to function. In this abundant scope of things, objects are no longer scarce; almost any practical need can be satisfied by countless products available. This saturation has produced a condition in which utility is assumed rather than valued, and objects compete less on what they do than on how they appear and circulate. As a result, we oscillate between boredom with what we own and the constant anticipation of replacement, rather than forming lasting relationships with the things around us.

When design is measured primarily through efficiency, clarity, or commercial success, its cultural and emotional dimensions are often sidelined. The modern emphasis on reduction and optimisation reflects a Western tradition that seeks to separate function from excess. While this approach has shaped contemporary systems of production, it has also narrowed how we understand objects, encouraging us to see them as transparent tools rather than participants in everyday life.

I am drawn to objects that resist imme-

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diate legibility—things whose purpose is recognisable but not entirely exhausted by use.

There is an appeal in encountering an object that invites attention and curiosity rather than instant comprehension. This interest led me to gather objects and images where function coexists with ambiguity. Objects feel less like instruments and more like presences, shaping experience through memory and familiarity.

Take the button as an example. At its most basic level, a button fastens two pieces of fabric, fulfilling a clear functional role. Yet they also shape how clothing sits on the body and communicate subtle clues about care, identity and status. Their material, colour, and form add layers of meaning that do not interfere with function but coexist alongside it.

These qualities influence how an object is perceived, worn, and valued, often long after its practical purpose has been met. Design historian David Brett suggests that ornament functions to “to make an object selectable, meaningful, affective and complete,” since it “completes the perceived object and places it in a semantic order.” 1 These observations prompt me to rethink how objects operate in everyday life. Objects

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do more than perform tasks; they shape how we live, connect with our surroundings, and relate to the material culture that frames daily experience. Although they do not act independently, objects carry memories, emotions, and values beyond utility, and it is through these ambiguous qualities that they begin to shape everyday practices.

1

David Brett, Rethinking Decoration: Pleasure and Ideology in the Visual Arts. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, ) 64.

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II. From Object to Thing

It is necessary to distinguish between an object as a functional entity and a thing as something more present and resistant. Cultural theorist Bill Brown proposes that objects become “things” when they stop working for us in a purely instrumental way—when they interrupt routine use and demand attention.2 In this shift, objects are no longer transparent tools but material presences that assert themselves through physical properties. They become resistant by refusing complete transparency, slowing interaction and inviting engagement beyond immediate use.

This distinction helps explain how objects can exceed function without abandoning it.

A thing does not replace an object; it emerges when use alone is no longer sufficient to account for an object’s significance.

Ornament often plays a crucial role in this transformation. Rather than functioning as surface decoration applied after the fact, ornament can be understood as a condition that invites attention and attachment, interrupting immediacy and encouraging engagement beyond efficiency. In this sense, ornament acts as

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a catalyst for “thingness,” prompting an object to be encountered not only as useful but as present.

This understanding challenges the modern opposition between ornament and function. The concept of functional ornament proposed here does not reject utility; instead, it suggests that ornament performs a different kind of function — one oriented toward mediation and relational experience. Through material detail, pattern, or gesture, ornament enables objects to participate in social and cultural life rather than merely serve practical needs.

A key offers a simple example. Its primary purpose is to open a lock, yet its material, weight, and form often suggest what kind of door it belongs to, who might own it, and the level of security or significance it protects.

The complexity of a key can signal intimacy or restriction, access or authority, while also situating it within a broader context of use and meaning. Here, what might be described as ornamental qualities do not oppose function; they contribute to it and also extend beyond it.

Seen this way, ornament contributes to how objects sustain meaning through use

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and familiarity. By embedding attention in material presence and detail, it supports relationships that unfold over time. As Hannah Arendt argues, design integrates so thoroughly into the configuration of that which mediates that it becomes invisible within everyday experience.3 Ornament, in this sense, is not an addition but part of the mediating structure through which objects become felt, not just used.

2 3

Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1 (2001): 1–22.

Eduardo Staszowski and Virginia Tassinari, eds., Designing in Dark Times: An Arendtian Lexicon (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020)

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III. Ornament as structure, Not Surplus

For most of its history, ornament was less a matter of embellishment than a way of thinking through form. From early tools and domestic objects to clothing and architecture, humans have consistently marked things beyond their immediate use. These markings were not surplus additions, but early containers of expression—material ways of recording observation, belief, and experience before written language. Ornament functioned as a form of material communication, embedding meaning within objects.

Long before it was asked to justify itself in terms of efficiency or use, ornament shaped how objects communicated and how meaning circulated through lived environments. What would later be framed as excess was once understood as necessity: a means of situating objects within cosmological, social, and sensory orders rather than isolating them as neutral tools.

In the nineteenth century, attempts were made to formalise ornament as a universal visual language. In The Grammar of Ornament (1856), Owen Jones proposed that transhistori-

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cal principles of geometry, rhythm, abstraction, and material honesty governed ornament.

His insistence that “true beauty results from that repose which the mind feels” framed ornament as a grammar rather than an impulse, capable of restraint and coherence even within the conditions of industrial modernity.4 Ornament, for Jones, was a disciplinary system intended to regulate visual order.

Henri Focillon’s The Life of Forms in Art (1934) departs from this regulatory model by proposing that form is alive, animated by internal forces rather than external rules. “Forms are not only signs,” Focillon writes, “but forces”— agents that exceed intention and resist closure.5 Ornament, in this view, is not subordinate to structure or function but one of the primary sites where form mutates and proliferates. Where Jones sought stability, Focillon emphasised vitality and autonomy.

Earlier art historians such as Alois Riegl had already insisted on ornament’s independence, tracing its continuity through recurring motifs across cultures and epochs. For Riegl, this continuity affirmed ornament as an autonomous historical phenomenon rather than a derivative embellishment.5 This position com-

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plicates later modernist narratives of rupture by insisting on ornament’s persistence as a form of cultural intelligence.

The decisive break emerges with early twentieth-century modernism, most notably through Adolf Loos’s rejection of ornament as a marker of cultural regression. His claim that “the evolution of culture is synonymous with the removal of ornament from objects of daily use” 6 did not simply reflect a change in taste; it enforced a moral hierarchy in which restraint signified progress and ornament was relegated to the primitive, the historical, or the irrational. What was lost in this rejection was not decoration alone, but an understanding of ornament as a legitimate mode of thought.

4 5 6 7

Owen Jones, The Grammar of Ornament (London: Day and Son, 1856), plate introduction.

Henri Focillon, The Life of Forms in Art, trans. Charles Beecher Hogan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948), 45.

Alois Riegl, Problems of Style: Foundations for a History of Ornament, trans. Evelyn Kain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 7–9.

Adolf Loos, “Ornament and Crime,” in Ornament and Crime: Selected Essays, trans. Michael Mitchell (Riverside, CA: Ariadne Press, 1998), 167.

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IV. Ornament, Power, and the Politics of Taste

The modern rejection of ornament cannot be understood solely as an internal development within design history. It unfolded alongside colonial expansion, industrial capitalism, and the consolidation of European cultural authority, producing hierarchies of taste that aligned aesthetics with power. As ornament was stripped from the objects of modern life, it was simultaneously projected outward— onto the colonised, the primitive, the feminine, and the working class—becoming a marker of difference rather than a legitimate mode of knowledge.

In Orientalism (1978), Edward Said describes how the “Orient” was constructed as a space of excess, sensuality, repetition, and timelessness—a cultural mirror against which European modernity defined itself as rational, progressive, and restrained.8 Non-European decorative traditions were admired, collected, and exhibited, yet denied historical development or intellectual agency. They were framed as static patterns rather than evolving systems, aestheticised but excluded from narra-

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tives of progress.

These divisions were reinforced by institutions of taste—museums and academies— that elevated abstraction, minimalism, and functional clarity as universal ideals. Ornament, when permitted, was relegated to craft, ethnography, or tradition categories that neutralised its critical potential by situating it outside modernity. What appeared as an aesthetic judgement was in fact a classed and colonial sorting mechanism.

Class further complicated this hierarchy.

Ornamental density, material richness, and visible labour were frequently associated with vulgarity or excess, while restraint and simplicity became markers of refinement and cultural capital. Minimalism, far from neutral, emerged as an aesthetic aligned with privilege, one that assumed access to space and resources, and the ability to replace objects rather than repair them. Ornament was not rejected because it lacked function, but because it signalled attachment, labour, and specificity—qualities that resisted standardisation and abstraction.

As modernist authority waned, these hierarchies were not dismantled but reconfigured. Ornament returned as a controlled aes-

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thetic resource, selectively mobilised within systems of consumption, branding, and lifestyle differentiation. Power no longer operated through prohibition but through modulation, shifting the question from whether ornament was allowed to how meaning itself was produced and circulated through objects. This marks the transition from modernist exclusion to postmodern circulation, from moral judgement to semiotic instability.

8

Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 1–3.

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V. Objects, Signs, and Instability

By the late twentieth century, the belief that objects could be defined solely by function had become increasingly untenable. As consumer culture expanded and accelerated, objects no longer circulated primarily as tools designed to meet needs, but as carriers of meaning within complex economies of desire and distinction. Use did not disappear, but was displaced, absorbed into systems of signification.9 Under these conditions, the modern opposition between function and ornament begins to collapse.

Rather than operating as neutral instruments, objects function as signs, communicating value through surface, style, and differentiation. What matters is not only what an object does, but what it signals about taste, belonging, or aspiration. Ornament, once condemned as surplus, becomes intrinsic to how objects operate within cultural systems.

Detail and aesthetic variation are no longer secondary to use but central to how objects are read and circulated.

Post-structuralist critiques of fixed

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meaning further destabilise this condition.

If meaning is produced relationally—through difference, repetition, and deferral—then objects cannot be fully resolved by their intended function or formal definition. They consistently exceed themselves, generating associations and effects that resist closure. Ornament appears here not as decorative excess, but as a visible trace of this instability, exposing the limits of functional transparency.

These dynamics unfold within broader social conditions characterised by fluidity rather than permanence. In Zygmunt Bauman’s description of liquid modernity, attachments are provisional, and identities are continually renegotiated.10 Objects are designed for circulation rather than duration, promising novelty and immediacy while discouraging long-term engagement. Ornament, under such conditions, is often flattened into styling. Yet this liquidity reveals why purely functional minimalism struggles to sustain meaning. Stripped of specificity and care, objects become interchangeable.

Read together, these perspectives suggest that ornament’s persistence is not a regression but a response to instability within contemporary material culture. Functional ornament

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refers here to ornament that is integral to an object’s operation and experience rather than merely decorative or historically referential.

Recognising that objects function simultaneously as tools, signs, and sources of relational value, functional ornament offers a way to negotiate these overlapping roles, supporting attachment and mediation when utility alone is insufficient.

Under contemporary conditions, branding has become one of the primary mechanisms through which ornament circulates. Logos, patterns, colour systems, and visual signatures operate as highly efficient ornamental devices: immediately legible, repeatable, and designed for rapid circulation.

Unlike earlier forms of ornament that accumulated meaning through use and familiarity, these visual structures privilege recognition over duration. As critics of sign-value and commodity culture have noted, meaning is stabilised through visibility and repetition rather than lived relation. Ornament does not disappear under these conditions; it intensifies. Yet this intensification often undermines ornament’s mediating capacity, flattening it into overstimulated surface—expressive,

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but detached from the temporal and material relationships through which objects become meaningful.

9 10

Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects, trans. James Benedict (London: Verso, 1996), 2–4.

Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), 3.

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VI. Functional Ornament as Practice

The object archive developed through this research consists of ordinary artefacts, drawn from and beyond domestic, civic, and infrastructural contexts. Their ornamental qualities are inseparable from their operation. Ornament is understood as embedded knowledge that emerges through making, use, and material engagement. It is operative rather than representational, producing meaning through interaction rather than symbol alone.

This approach draws on Adam Glenn’s critique of how craft and ornament were jointly marginalised by industrial modernity, echoing earlier arguments regarding the modernist relegation of ornament to surplus or irrationality. Both craft and ornament were cast as inferior forms of knowledge—expressive rather than technical, tacit rather than rational— and judged against standards of usefulness that excluded embodied intelligence.

Functional ornament returns to the proposition that ornament mediates meaning and attachment. By recognising detail, pattern, and material variation as carriers of tech-

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nical and cultural information, it challenges reductive framings of ornament as surplus.

Rather than aesthetic residue, ornament operates here as a mode of problem-setting that structures interaction, expectation, and care.

This methodology resists both industrial reduction and superficial styling by framing ornament as functional mediation. It expands the definition of function beyond efficiency and performance to include care, memory, and continuity. Functional ornament thus operates as a practical design approach, one that supports objects in remaining meaningful not through optimisation alone, but through their sustained presence within everyday life.

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VII. Conclusion

I remember reading Bruno Latour explain that, before the word design was translated into French, it meant no more than what we now call relooking.11 This idea helped me make sense of many of the observations that shaped this research, through an obsessive gathering of objects that resemble the idea of functional ornament.

What I hope for anyone who has encountered this research is a reminder to relook and to question why things exist the way they do.

In doing so, we may discover that the objects we encounter every day contain far more stories than they initially reveal. Instead of being carried along by whoever is assumed to decide what we need or what looks good, we can gain more autonomy in judging what we truly value and in cherishing what we already have.

Likewise, when we are in the position of creating and making, we can move away from producing out of a need for content or novelty, and instead create objects that are emotionally grounded and truthfully connected—objects that hold value for makers and designers, as well as for those who will live with them.

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It is through the re-examination of ornament, from historical periods to contemporary contexts, that we begin to see how values were exchanged and how narratives were established through material form.

Contemporary design practice shows that ornament does not simply signal a return to historical forms, but reflects changing material and social conditions. The prevalence of mass-produced goods optimised for efficiency has coincided with a visible shift toward objects that emphasise individuality, material specificity, and personal expression. This is particularly evident among independent designers and makers who, as Glenn (2021) discusses, increasingly work outside conventional manufacturing systems, enabled by accessible fabrication tools, shared maker spaces, and open-source digital platforms. Within this evolving context, detail and surface qualities are less the result of decorative intent and more the product of situated decision-making that responds to both technological affordances and cultural values.

I hope these functional ornaments can continue to remind us why we create in the first place. At a time when tools are becoming

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increasingly advanced and “smarter” at solving pragmatic problems, and when AI software can generate endless formal options, it is more important than ever to relook. What we depend on from objects has never been purely utilitarian. The emotions and memories we build through living with things endure, while objects that cannot carry this burden are more easily discarded, often turning labour and resources into wasted effort.

The efficiency of making, producing, and selling is not necessarily efficient at all.

When labour and material resources are mobilised only to accelerate replacement, they contribute to faster cycles of waste.

By contrast, objects made with care and emotional investment tend to remain—in use, in memory, and in circulation—thereby forming genuine cultures and communities.

Functional ornament, as it appears here, names this ongoing attentiveness—a way of noticing how objects gather meaning through use, care, and continued presence.

11

Keynote lecture by Bruno Latour, Sciences-Po, for the Networks of Design meeting of the Design History Society, Falmouth, Cornwall, 3rd September 2008. Original source: Brown Walker Press http:// brownwalker.com/book/1599429063

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COLOPHON © ecal, 2026 Master Product Design Thesis

Text & Image research

Mo Tong Yang Graphic Design

Xiang-Xiang Lee Supervisors

Anniina Koivu Brynjar Sigurðarson Assistant

Paula Mühlena Head of Program

Camille Blin Special Thanks

Oli Stratford Typeface

Dialectic by Lucas Portron Cover Grotesk by Xiang-Xiang Lee © 2026 First edition, 10 copies.

The visual materials supporting this research were discovered in digital museum archives mainly the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, and the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

All images sources used for this book can be found on the previous pages.

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