Frank Lloyd’s Wright’s design principles of form and function are just as relevant today, Kent Eisenhuth believes. Google’s interaction designer explained to an audience at the SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, how Lloyd Wright had reacted against the ostentatious Victorian design sensibilities that dominated when he started his career. Houses were a showcase of wealth through ornamentation, often non-functional and cluttered, and his reaction informed a new philosophy of architecture.

Lloyd Wright was from the prairie, where buildings primarily needed to provide shelter from the harsh elements and be a comfortable home. His details served a purpose: signature overhanging rooves provided shelter from the sun and from thunder storms, and the pool outside his Imperial Hotel in Japan was designed in case of fire. Design decisions should serve a meaningful purpose, Eisenhuth explained.

Lloyd Wright would not have been a fan of skeumorphism; he believed in the integrity of materials that didn’t need to be disguised or dressed up as something else. Wood, concrete, metal - they should all be true. In digital design that means no fake leather or wood, but approaching the screen as a window into a digital space, a virtual world.

Where Lloyd Wright said form should follow function, the digital designer can think of content, form and user interface becoming one. The Clear app is a great example, said Eisenhuth, of functional design, training the user how to navigate the app using animated menus.

And there should be harmony. Lloyd Wright said: “No house should ever be ion the hill or on anything. It should be of the hill. Belonging to it. Hill and house should live together each the happier for it.” As did his masterpiece, Fallingwater. Eisenhuth said that devices are the land for digital designers, who have to take their cue from the device.